Popular quotes about Absence! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 7
Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death.
Jess BowenThere is no such thing as experience here. You seem to know, you imagine. Imagination must come to an end...I don't know how to put it. The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension - THAT is the thing. That is a thing that cannot be experienced at all. It is not an experience.
U.G. KrishnamurtiPlay is an expression of God's presence in the world; one clear sign of God's absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter.
Mike YaconelliEven if the absence of evidence for a given god were not evidence of its absence, it would still be evidence that the belief in that god is unreasonable. That's the only proposition that any atheist of any kind has to demonstrate in order to win the argument. Because anything beyond that... is just having fun.
Scott CliftonThe window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.
Sri Nisargadatta MaharajIn positive terms, we can state that psychological maturity entails finding greater satisfaction in giving than in receiving; having a capacity to form satisfying and permanent loyalties; being primarily a creative, contributing person; having learned to profit from experience; having a freedom from fear (anxiety) with a resulting true serenity and not a pseudo absence of tension; and accepting and making the most of unchangeable reality when it confronts one.
William C. MenningerThe greatest gift for an individual or a nation... was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but absence of fear from the mind.
Aung San Suu KyiIn the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.
Winona LaDukeIt's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.
Jonathan Safran FoerMy dear, the duty that devolved wholly on you in my absence of guiding and expanding the minds of our dear children is a laborious one and a responsible one.
Ezra CornellWould a soul continually eye His everlasting tenderness and compassion...[then] it could not bear an hour's absence from Him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.
John OwenThe absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married. If my brother gets hit by a car tomorrow, my sister-in-law will go on living materially in the same way that she does now. If the same thing happens to me, a great deal of what I have will go off to the taxman. That's because of one of, as you doubtless know, eleven hundred federal laws that favor marriage.
Andrew SolomonThe astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
Ralph Waldo EmersonHealth is wholeness--wholeness in its most profound sense, with nothing left out and everything in just the right order to manifest the mystery of balance. Far from being simply the absence of disease, health is a dynamic and harmonious equilibrium of all the elements and forces making up and surrounding a human being.
Andrew WeilI have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books... It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is as though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character. Aside from that, for me it constituted something like sanity insurance.
William BrinkleyDesire, liberated from its ties to the ego, realizes that it has no other aspiration than the fullness of Mahamudra and, as it sees in the same impulse that this plenitude is innate and limitless, it no longer aspires to any realization whatsoever. There is no longer anything but intimate vibration, continuous sacred tremoring, and the absence of localization in time and space.
Daniel OdierSomewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.
Haruki MurakamiI've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
Li-Young LeeWe lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Ralph Waldo EmersonBut what I found most interesting was that Aaron had apparently found a way to pass the time without her. Beside him, holding his hand, was a Moroi girl who looked about eleven but had to be older, unless he'd become a pedophile during our absence.
Richelle MeadAnd one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.
Paulo CoelhoI fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.
Dinah Maria Murlock CraikAverage human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
Henry AdamsI think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc.
Mona KuhnThere is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.
Nikolai BerdyaevThe collapse of good conscience and the absence of accountability and public scrutiny have led to crimes against humanity and violations of international law.
Nelson MandelaIn drawing an inference or conclusion from facts proved, regard must always be had to the nature of the particular case, and the facility that appears to be afforded, either of explanation or contradiction. No person is to be required to explain or contradict, until enough has been proved to warrant a reasonable and just conclusion against him, in the absence of explanation or contradiction.
Tony AbbottI see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.Does the presence of pain mean the absence of God?
Max LucadoWe are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears.
John McCainFreedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Bertrand RussellMany Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity.
Sam StormsA truly free society must not include a peace which oppresses us. We must learn on our own terms what peace and freedom mean together. There can be no peace if there is social injustice and suppression of human rights, because external and internal peace are inseparable. Peace is not just the absence of mass destruction, but a positive internal and external condition in which people are free so that they can grow to their full potential.
Petra KellyThere is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.
Bayard RustinThe poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
Philip LarkinMan is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Bertrand RussellPeace is more than just absence of war. It is rather a state in which no people of any country, in fact no group of people of any kind live in fear or in need.
Poul HartlingIn order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.
Laura Ingalls WilderThe absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
ThucydidesIndians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.
Sherman Alexie