Absence Quotes

#1. Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief? #Quote by Pam Houston

#2. Peace is but the absence of war. War and conflict form the sea through which nation-states swim. Some who have had the fortune to find clear, calm waters believe otherwise. They have forgotten that war is momentum. War is natural. And war makes one strong. #Quote by Robert Jackson Bennett

#3. There is a Silence that is totally impersonal.
It is not the fruit of anybody's work.
Peace is there, but there is no peacekeeper.
This Peace is only known when the noise of the person is not present.
In the absence of the 'person' there are no distractions.
Only the ever-pure Awareness prevails.
The Ultimate is nobody's achievement at all. #Quote by Mooji

#4. Every morning and evening, Livia granted her eyes the only thing they asked for all day: a sweeping, hopeful look at the platform. And every time, her gut registered the punch of his absence. #Quote by Debra Anastasia

#5. In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die? No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives. #Quote by Paulo Coelho

#6. To return after long years of painful absence to some place which has been the scene of our former joys, and whence the force of circumstance, and not choice, has driven us, is oppressive to the heart. #Quote by Samuel Lover

#7. I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, some time, perhaps, when we are angry with one another. #Quote by Donald Barthelme

#8. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, "What great people!" They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families. #Quote by Michael Lewis

#9. Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it. #Quote by Scott Hawkins

#10. The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance - and choose wisely. #Quote by Kevin DeYoung

#11. Peace and supreme joy may seem like end-states to practitioners on more difficult spiritual paths, but the path of devotion should be filled with peace and joy from the very beginning. Their absence is an indication that something is amiss. (125) #Quote by Prem Prakash

#12. A True friend is one who sees a fault, gives you advice and who defends you in your absence. #Quote by Ali Ibn Abi Talib

#13. Love...also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same. #Quote by Sophie Mackintosh

#14. To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour. #Quote by Gerhard Richter

#15. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet - a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#16. The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children - it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice - that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we lean, at best, to ironize our wishes - that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true - and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.(…)
There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we liv #Quote by Adam Phillips

#17. She filled in the blanks that worry and darkness had left in its wake. She was my mind-double. My life-sitter. My literal other half when half of me had gone. She covered for me, waiting patiently like a war wife, during my absence from myself. #Quote by Matt Haig

#18. There is a hole in the heart called "absence". You live in it my dear. #Quote by Malak El Halabi

#19. Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. #Quote by Baruch Spinoza

#20. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. #Quote by Barbara Kingsolver

#21. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. #Quote by John C. Lennox

#22. Good morning.
Your very presence is intoxicating.
Good night.
Your very absence is sobering. #Quote by Lin-Manuel Miranda

#23. Make that cage golden, it's still a fucking cage."
"Wel , in the absence of other options, gold will have to do. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#24. Why is it that looking through someone's things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of their person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings? #Quote by Valeria Luiselli

#25. She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out. #Quote by Henry Miller

#26. From the pocket of her windbreaker he extracted what he falsely believed to be a portable marine radio, which along with two granola bars he'd pilfered from Honey's belongings after she was snatched by the club-handed lunatic. Shreave started pressing buttons on the compact gadget and barking, "Mayday! Mayday!
There was no response from the Coast Guard pilot or any other human, and for a good reason. Except for its LED screen, the instrument in Shreave's possession was electronically dissimilar to a radio in all significant respects. Most crucial was the absence of either an audio receiver or a transmitter.
"SOS! SOS!" he persisted. "Help!"
The device was in fact a mobile GPS unit, as technogically impenetrable to Shreave as the Taser gun he'd found beneath Honey's bed. #Quote by Carl Hiaasen

#27. Peace must be more than the absence of war. #Quote by Helmut Kohl

#28. The fruit of meditation is not the absence of thoughts, but the fact that thoughts cease to harm us. Once enemies, they become friends. #Quote by Bokar Rinpoche

#29. And then I saw it. My father's wood: thick by then with twenty years' growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart.
I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God's-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I'd felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he'd tried to say to me on the night of my wedding.
'Love is the thing that only God sees.'
I'd wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna's influence, or maybe the few words he'd had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise.
Love is the thing that only God sees. I supposeyou'dsay that's because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he'll see no more than I've told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife- not in the way that she deserved. My c #Quote by Joanne Harris

#30. Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities. #Quote by Allan Bloom

#31. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's the choice that something else is greater than that fear. #Quote by Theodore Roosevelt

#32. For me, it's not necessarily interesting to play a strong, fearless woman. It's interesting to play a woman who is terrified and then overcomes that fear. It's about the journey. Courage is not the absence of fear, it's overcoming it. #Quote by Natalie Dormer

#33. Absence doesn't always make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes it just teaches us that we can live apart. #Quote by Michael Faudet

#34. I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger. #Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#35. Because freedom and liberty and equality are as vital as breath, we only notice their absence when we are left gasping when the colors of diversity and individual liberty are drained from the world around us. #Quote by Christina Engela

#36. I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment. #Quote by Simone De Beauvoir

#37. But that was the most dangerous part, as well as the most alluring. She wanted to feel him take her to that edge. The edge where life met death, where colour met the absence of it, where light met the darkness. She wanted him to bring her to this brink, and she wanted him to let her fall. Why? She longed for self-destruction. She longed to let him show her his darkest, so that she could save him. She had the delusion, no...she was disillusioned. She knew the truth. She also knew that loving him and wanting to save him, to be some sick twisted heaven sent angel was her truest wish. She knew that she could do no saving. She couldn't even save herself, how could she save someone else?

She wanted to encapture his heart. She wanted to destroy it, and she wanted to burn him down. Why? So she could watch him as he writhed in the ashes, and became something new. She wanted to watch him rebirth himself in those flames and ashes, like a pheonix would. Why would she want this of him? Why...because she simply could. She wanted to destroy their love, him and her along with it. She wanted to savor it forever. Some beast inside her, wanted nothing more than their destruction, so that it could smile in that darkness. That darkness within her, wanted him like nothing else could matter. She would die for his darkness, so she could bring him to the light. However, she was far from the light herself. She wanted to trade herself in for someone better than she was. She wanted to give hi #Quote by Jennifer Megan Varnadore

#38. Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat ... Our words for unhealthy contamination
"soiled" or "dirty"
suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew. #Quote by Barbara Kingsolver

#39. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but absence also dulls the memory and then we tend to forget who we were missing in the first place. #Quote by Anthony T. Hincks

#40. After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'. #Quote by Octave Mirbeau

#41. The absence of consistent biblical worldview thinking is a key mark of spiritual immaturity. #Quote by Albert Mohler

#42. if I did not love death
my suffering
my desire for you
would kill me

your absence
your distress
make me nauseous
it's time for me to love death
it's time to bite its hands #Quote by Georges Bataille

#43. One cannot launch a new history - the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but 'progress' - the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events. #Quote by Osip Mandelstam

#44. Like as the culver on the bared bough
Sits mourning for the absence of her mate #Quote by Edmund Spenser

#45. For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, the controlling word in the term 'entrepreneurial management' is 'entrepreneurial'. For the new venture, it is 'management'. In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is its absence. The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and even profits. What it does not have is a 'business', a viable, operating, organized 'present' in which people know where they are going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being 'managed', it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it attracts, how good its products, nor even how great the demand for them. #Quote by Peter F. Drucker

#46. Identity seems to be non-existent at a personal level - at best we can end up in a minority, and those who discuss it most are just those people who are aware of its absence in themselves. #Quote by Anthony Marais

#47. If your absence is ever felt, then you will be either missed or cursed. #Quote by Shreya Gupta

#48. There is a hole in the universe.
It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.
That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens. #Quote by K.C. Cole

#49. Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering. #Quote by Albert Camus

#50. Your mind creates everything. Your conscious mind has much greater power than you can ever imagine. Your mind can create blessings or disasters, can heal or harm, can bring abundance or absence. It is up to your mind whether the world looks hopeful or hopeless. #Quote by Ilchi Lee

#51. It is not truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of ideals; they spring from wrong ideals. #Quote by John Dewey

#52. The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. #Quote by Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

#53. They obstinately persisted in their absence #Quote by Douglas Adams

#54. The only way to know the real Self in the absence of knowledge, is to be "it". #Quote by Vivian Amis

#55. Surreal realized Daemon's madness was confined to emotions, to people, to that single tragedy he couldn't face. It was as if Titian had never died, as if Surreal hadn't spent three years whoring in back alleys before Daemon found her again and arranged for a proper education in a Red Moon house. He thought she was still a child, and he continued to fret about Titian's absence. But when she mentioned a book she was reading, he made a dry observation about her eclectic taste and proceeded to tell her about other books that might be of interest. It was the same with music, with art. They posed no threat to him, had no time frame, weren't part of the nightmare of Jaenelle bleeding on that Dark Altar. #Quote by Anne Bishop

#56. Her eyes are grey. Her hair is straggly and wet. Her fingers are stubby. The nails are chewed and broken. Her teeth are crooked, jagged things. There is a vacancy in her gaze, a feeling of absence when you are near her that is impossible to put into words. Her sigil is the hooked ring. One day her hook will catch your heart. Describing her, we articulate what she is and why she is: when hope is past, she is there. She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey concrete buildings and anonymous hotels. She is on the other side of every mirror. When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes. She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable. #Quote by Neil Gaiman

#57. I would give everything, even memory - especially memory - if I could hold Leo again. The weight of his absence is the weight of the entire world. I #Quote by Simon Van Booy

#58. - What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. #Quote by James Joyce

#59. I like to think I get better with age, but maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder. #Quote by Bonnie Raitt

#60. I only have one story now.
The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being. #Quote by Alice Hoffman

#61. Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. #Quote by William T. Vollmann

#62. In wanting, a man knows himself better than in having, since, in the absence of temporal things, man is better prepared for the reception of eternal things. #Quote by John Tauler

#63. The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes 'contouring' - the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power. #Quote by Jean Baudrillard

#64. Aiden had filled a part of my heart that I hadn't known was empty. And for that I'd be forever grateful. Beneath the pain was the reality of the end of whatever it was we'd shared. I missed him, and his absence was profound. He was everywhere, yet he was nowhere at all. #Quote by Lilly Wilde

#65. When you find inner peace, neither the presence nor absence of any person, place or thing, condition, circumstance, or situation can be the Creator of your state of mind or the cause of your experience of being. #Quote by Neale Donald Walsch

#66. His heart is expended that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love. #Quote by Yann Martel

#67. My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#68. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. #Quote by Lara Chapman

#69. Courage is not an absence of fear, but an act of the will to move forward in the presence of fear. Fear whispers, "You might ... " Courage rebuffs it with, "Sure, but ... ." To seek a fearless life is not the same as seeking a life of courage. If we're talking about story, which is about nothing if not life, no one gives a damn about fearlessness. Very few great stories move forward with a fearless hero. Why would they? #Quote by David DuChemin

#70. I find myself somehow different
My eyes running in his presence
His walk as if he was drunk
Neither day nor night, the moments were somewhere tonight
Still unknown where his soul was
Just thinking about him today onwards

My soul says he needs me
In my absence he cries behind me
My presence makes him peaceful
As if I remain in his soul

Till my heart the love is tied
His eyes unfolding every lies
Say my friends are we made for life?! #Quote by Sapana Bhandari

#71. This is perhaps why so many of us who know love fear love. We know that love is not the absence of pain. If anything, love is the promise of pain. No one has loved more deeply than God. Has anyone ever been more betrayed? God would not know suffering if He did not know love. But because He is Love, He chose to suffer on our behalf. Without love there is no glory in suffering. #Quote by Erwin Raphael McManus

#72. Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence. #Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

#73. of the agreed facts: the official bedding; the young couple co-habiting at Ludlow; their youth and health; and the absence of any concern about the consummation of their marriage; convincingly indicates #Quote by Philippa Gregory

#74. If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. #Quote by Steve Allen

#75. They say there's peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire's absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache. #Quote by Leah Stewart

#76. We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn't, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most undiluted form of religion: it tells us not to believe in anything at all. Atheists hate the religious and the religious hate atheists, but this is only a deception! We are all deceived! There is only one boat and we are all in it! All at the same time! #Quote by C. JoyBell C.

#77. Indians 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. #Quote by Sherman Alexie

#78. Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something. #Quote by Lisa Unger

#79. One great cause of the vanity, extravagance and idleness that are so fast growing upon our young ladies, is the absence of domestic education. #Quote by Lydia Maria Francis Child

#80. When I started really writing fantasy, one of the things I noticed was a real absence of sexuality in the genre at all. And it's such a profound part of the human experience that it's a really big thing to leave out. #Quote by Jacqueline Carey

#81. Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience. #Quote by Clayton M. Christensen

#82. Free is one that breaks the chains of one's mind and surrenders to that which gives absence of fear. #Quote by Tambre Bryant

#83. Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced. #Quote by Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby Of Shulbrede

#84. In youth, the absense of pleasure is pain, in old age, the absence of pain is pleasure. #Quote by Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth

#85. Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it. #Quote by Hannah More

#86. The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect
even if rejected
enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters. #Quote by Alice Walker

#87. Don't think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer sun blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit. #Quote by Diane Ackerman

#88. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without despair or loss, there is no hope. #Quote by Haruki Murakami

#89. Sometimes neither distance makes the heart grow fonder nor absence lessens surging passions. #Quote by Faraaz Kazi

#90. From the Balkans to Africa, from Asia to the Middle East, we have witnessed the weakening or absence of effective governance leading to the ravaging of human rights and the abandonment of longstanding humanitarian principles. We need competent and responsible states to meet the needs of "we the peoples" for whom the UN was created. And the world's peoples will not be fully served unless peace, development and human rights, the three pillars of the UN, are advanced together with equal vigour. #Quote by Ban Ki-moon

#91. Faith is the acknowledgment of the entire absence of all goodness in us, and the recognition of the cross as the substitute for all the want on our part. Faith saves, because it owns the complete salvation of another, and not because it contributes anything to that salvation. #Quote by Horatius Bonar

#92. We don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace. #Quote by T. S. Eliot

#93. Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht ) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them. #Quote by Eugene Ionesco

#94. How did one deal with such ingrained cowardice? Then I realized that there is no such thing as courage in the absence of cowardice. Courage is also a choice: It's what happens when one refuses to give in to fear. #Quote by Sherry Thomas

#95. Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires. #Quote by Bertrand Russell

#96. Does she belong to you, Finnikin?" Yata asked, her eyes piercing. "No," he said after a moment. "But she belongs to my heart. I feel her absence strongly and it brings me ... sorrow. #Quote by Melina Marchetta

#97. It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, 'Know thyself,' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident. #Quote by George Eliot

#98. The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking."

-- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters. #Quote by Gary Snyder

#99. Edward Glaeser writes, "Cities are the absence of physical space between people."11 #Quote by Timothy Keller

#100. …Sometimes there are things that people should be afraid of."
"Like the dark?"
She shook her head. "No, more the absence of light. #Quote by Carrie Jones

#101. He knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves. #Quote by David Halberstam

#102. Freedom doesn't mean the absence of all restrictions. It means possessing unshakable conviction in the face of any obstacle. #Quote by Daisaku Ikeda

#103. Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#104. But if you could for a time wipe out all the poets and all their poetry from the world, then you would soon discover, by their very absence, where the men of action got their energy from, and who really supplied the life-sap to their harvest-field. It is not those who have plunged deep down into the Pundit's Ocean of Renunciation, nor those who are always clinging to their possessions; it is not those who have become adepts in turning out quantities of work, nor those who are ever telling the dry beads of duty,--it is not these who win at last. But it is those who love, because they live. These truly win, for they truly surrender. They accept pain with all their strength and with all their strength they remove pain. It is they who create, because they know the secret of true joy, which is the secret of detachment. #Quote by Rabindranath Tagore

#105. Empowerment is the intentional absence of negativity. #Quote by Stephanie Lennox

#106. The absence of any kind of communication from her was not at all like an absence. It was instead a presence: of mind-pain, like a thick, rusted arrow shooting straight into my head, poisoning my mind with something like tetanus, causing my thoughts to go haywire, a spasm here, a spasm there. #Quote by Chinelo Okparanta

#107. It took several minutes, and when Butters woke up, Andi and Marci, both naked, both rather pleasant that way, were giving him CPR. They'd kept his body alive in the absence of his soul.
"Wow," Butters slurred as he opened his eyes. He looked back and forth between the two werewolf girls. "Subtract the horrible pain in my chest, and all the mold and mildew, and I'm living the dream."
Then he passed out. #Quote by Jim Butcher

#108. Even in your absence I fight with you in my mind, I laugh with you in my mind.
That's how the strong connection exists between you and me. It will be forever. #Quote by Emma Brynstein

#109. A little-known fact: Next to nothing is impossible. Actually, nothing itself is impossible. Nothing is the absence of all things. But that absence is, itself, a thing, and - well, the logic's so screwy you could uncork a wine bottle with it.
The point is, most of the stuff people say is impossible is not at all impossible. Starting a car that's already started, that's im- possible. Traveling to where you are is impossible. Sleeping through Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is impossible (and so is listening to it).
And that's the list. Taking a neon-blue dump? Well... You'd think, but really it's just improbable.
To sum up a wildly unmanageable concept: most things we call impossible are actually just things that require more effort than we're willing to give. And even when it comes to impossible, it's really only the Rick Astley that nobody will try if they're given a few slices of pizza. #Quote by Daniel Younger

#110. In the absence of love, sex ceases to be an instrument of intimacy and turns into a weapon causing dents and cracks in the relationship. #Quote by Prem Jagyasi

#111. Her absence in my life was so painful that it was a presence. #Quote by Karen Marie Moning

#112. We may feel fear but we do not have to give in to it. We can do whatever we need and want to do, even if we have to "do it afraid." Courage is not the absence of fear; it is action in the presence of fear. #Quote by Joyce Meyer

#113. Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration. #Quote by Jeffrey Zeldman

#114. Courage isn't the absence of fear but the willingness to proceed in the face of it. #Quote by Niurka

#115. Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more -- every thing presses on -- whilst thou are twisting that lock, -- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make! #Quote by Laurence Sterne

#116. The night after we talked, Jason couldn't sleep. He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence. "She's not a bad girl," my friend said. "She was just choosing the best story available to her." I pictured his daughter flipping through the channels of life, as it were, stopping on a story that seemed most compelling at the moment, a story that offered her something, anything, because people can't live without a story, without a role to play. "So how did you get her out of it? #Quote by Donald Miller

#117. But the absence of him is everywhere I look. It's like a huge hole has been punched through my chest. #Quote by Stephenie Meyer

#118. We have no Constitution which functions in the absence of a moral people #Quote by John Adams

#119. This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain.
For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life. #Quote by Carlo Rovelli

#120. True love isn't the kind that endures through long years of absence, but the kind that endures through long years of propinquity. #Quote by Helen Rowland

#121. The quiet is eerie, the absence of the living dead. I'm no stranger to this kind of silence and I'm almost ready to believe not seeing the infected is worse than seeing them because at least wherever they are, you know where you shouldn't be. #Quote by Courtney Summers

#122. The absence of strife does not necessarily indicate the presence of peace. #Quote by John Hagee

#123. You remain so silent,as carried away,
through mist of your thoughts,so dark and so deep,
and even awake same as when asleep,
waiting for enlightenment of a newborn day.

I'm bound to your silence,to the core i'm bound,
to delicate stillness,so cruel and so tender,
that despite of danger,soul yearns to surrender,
to that mesmerizing absence of the sound.

I resign everything i once knew so clear,
throwing in the wind fragments of my past,
they are worth so little,they're nothing but dust,
nothing to remember,and nothing to fear... #Quote by Aleksandra Ninkovic

#124. In an expression of true gratitude, sadness is conspicuous only by its absence #Quote by Marcus Aurelius

#125. Watching the vast ocean, the flickering sunlight, thinking of the distant lands, Eliza was enveloped by a feeling quite unlike any she'd experienced before. A warmth, a glimpse of possibility, an absence of wariness- #Quote by Kate Morton

#126. He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble.
The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.
But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death. #Quote by Milan Kundera

#127. If there is a single fact which anyone who seriously studies the history of Christianity cannot help but be struck by, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name this great international religion bears
Jesus Christ. We know of him only what is told to us in the New Testament gospels, that is, practically nothing. #Quote by Savitri Devi

#128. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people - as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn't the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive. #Quote by Justin Cronin

#129. Someone shouldn't need to be faced with your absence to value your presence. #Quote by Nitya Prakash

#130. I, my own damn self, am not a Tea Party supporter. I disagree with them on social liberties, our overseas wars, Obama's birthplace, Sarah Palin, and the conspicuous absence of tea at their rallies. #Quote by Penn Jillette

#131. Happiness is simply the absence of desire.- When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
As Caed Budris says, "Happiness is the space between on desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming. #Quote by James Clear

#132. Violence only makes a situation worse. It cannot help but provoke a violent response. Strictly speaking, satyagraha is not "nonviolence." It is a means, a method. The word we translate as "nonviolence" is a Sanskrit word central in Buddhism as well: ahimsa, the complete absence of violence in word and even thought as well as action. This sounds negative, just as "nonviolence" sounds passive. But like the English word "flawless," ahimsa denotes perfection. Ahimsa is unconditional love; satyagraha is love in action. Gandhi's message #Quote by Eknath Easwaran

#133. To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in
sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido. #Quote by Umberto Eco

#134. I notice your absence. I notice your non presence and reflect on the time you were present, in the present, which is obviously in the past. #Quote by Jarod Kintz

#135. White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost. #Quote by Reni Eddo-Lodge

#136. Deeply in love with you, I feel the keen pain of your absence. #Quote by Laura Ramirez

#137. Two days ago I didn't even know this man. Now his absence is an earthquake. #Quote by Beth Teliho

#138. We stood there for a few seconds where my father and I had spoken of Oliver once. Now he and I were speaking of my father. Tomorrow, I'll think back on this moment and let the ghosts of their absence maunder in the twilit hour of the day. #Quote by Andre Aciman

#139. Absence really can make the heart grow fonder, even when the [man's] feet wander. #Quote by Amy Dickinson

#140. Absence makes the heart growl, "Find her. #Quote by Kirk Diedrich

#141. He brushed his thumb against her naked flesh and gently transferred his attention to her swollen lower lip.
"I did this to you. Does it hurt ?" he whispered.
"It only aches in your absence. #Quote by Sylvain Reynard

#142. It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things? #Quote by Kate Morton

#143. If you wish to leave, there is nothing, to my knowledge, to stop you,' said Jerott.

'Well, that's good news,' said Marthe, with final and unanswerable malice. 'I thought you needed the gold in my saddle.'

Deferentially, Salablanca's voice broached Jerott's silence. 'La señorita has known that the gold has been concealed in that place?'

'La señorita,' said Marthe coldly, 'in the absence of offers, has been saddling and unsaddling that damned horse like a coal-heaver for three days since you sewed the coins in the lining. It was hardly likely the weight would fail to attract my attention.'

Which left Jerott wondering, gloomily, which it was Lymond had miscalculated so severely: Marthe's native intelligence, or the chivalry of her masculine escort: himself. #Quote by Dorothy Dunnett

#144. As Dr. Hamid Rashid, the senior Bangladeshi economist and a leader of the UNDP's Legal Empowerment of the Poor program, has flatly stated: "With limited and insecure land rights, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the poor to overcome poverty."80 And once again, it is the women in the developing world who are most devastated by the lawless chaos of insecure property rights. In the absence of clear and documented legal rights to property, there are two other social forces that step into the vacuum and settle who gets what: 1) brute force, and 2) traditional cultural norms. And under both influences women generally lose - and brutally so. #Quote by Gary A. Haugen

#145. So much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God is somewhat bewildering, as no one appears to be nearly as excited about a similar absence of belief in unicorns, vampires, werewolves, astrology, nation-building, or the Labor Theory of Value. Nor is anyone dedicating much of their time to writing books and giving speeches at universities and conferences with the avowed goal of convincing others not to believe in them either. #Quote by Vox Day

#146. In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy. #Quote by Craig D. Lounsbrough

#147. The Crowd Follower: I don't believe it?



The Risk Taker: What exactly you don't believe? The completion of the project or the process of completion.



The Crowd Follower: I don't believe this can be done this way. No one ever thought of such method, it is beyond my belief.



The Risk Taker: Exactly! Your belief was in the failure, you believed its impossible, & when the work progressed, you started questioning the process?



The Crowd Follower: I need to know how they made it possible?



The Risk Taker: It's very simple, unlike you. They started with a clean thought process & a missing ingredient, you know what was missing? The belief that it is impossible.



They believed it's possible, & they kept trying & improvising during the process. The absence of a dis-belief resulted in a new method.



They discussed the set-backs/failures in a positive manner on making it more effective, and not to declare the project as failure & stop work.



It's the thought process which provides a positive or negative result, when you start negatively you are already working towards proving your point that it's impossible, didn't I tell you so? However positive thoughts generates a positive energy that produces improvisation & innovation required to succeed #Quote by Shahenshah Hafeez Khan

#148. People tend to measure themselves by external accomplishments, but jail allows a person to focus on internal ones; such as honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, generosity and an absence of variety. You learn to look into yourself. #Quote by Nelson Mandela

#149. In "The Cost of Discipleship" Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes it clear that grace is free, but it is not cheap. The grace of God is unearned and unearnable, but if we ever expect to grow in grace, we must pay the price of a consciously chosen course of action which involves both individual and group life. Spiritual growth is the purpose of the Disciplines.

It might be helpful to visualize what we have been discussing. Picture a long, narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side. The chasm to the right is the way of moral bankruptcy through human strivings for righteousness. Historically this has been called the heresy of moralism. The chasm to the left is moral bankruptcy through the absence of human strivings. This has been called the heresy of antinomianism. On the ridge there is a path, the Disciplines of the spiritual life. This path leads to the inner transformation and healing for which we seek. We must never veer off to the right or to the left, but stay on the path. The path is fraught with severe difficulties, but also with incredible joys. As we travel on this path the blessing of God will come upon us and reconstruct us into the image of Jesus Christ. We must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur. #Quote by Richard J. Foster

#150. The absence of limitations is the enemy of art. #Quote by Orson Welles

#151. The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal, and even Christians feel it as normal - which is why absorbing the culture all around us and its priorities is so dangerous. #Quote by John Piper

#152. Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered. #Quote by Ernst Junger

#153. This political disorder found expression in Machiavelli Prince. In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power; The Prince gives shrewd advice as to how to play this game successfully. What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion. #Quote by Bertrand Russell

#154. Domination, I have argued, is a twisting of the bonds of love. Domination does not repress the desire for recognition; rather, it enlists and transforms it. Beginning in the breakdown of the tension between self and other, domination proceeds through the alternate paths of identifying with or submitting to powerful others who personify the fantasy of omnipotence. For the person who takes this route to establishing his own power, there is an absence where the other should be. This void is filled with fantasy material in which the other appears so dangerous or so weak - or both - that he threatens the self and must be controlled. A vicious cycle begins: the more the other is subjugated, the less he is experienced as a human subject and the more distance or violence the self must deploy against him. #Quote by Jessica Benjamin

#155. In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left - ignorant how to react - with a foolish grin. #Quote by Emil M. Cioran

#156. How delightful it is to see a friend after a length of absence! How delightful to chide him for that length of absence to which we owe such delight. #Quote by Walter Savage Landor

#157. In general, I know that when speaking of private and opposing worlds, one tends to refer to divided, sometimes even irreconcilable facets of personality or of the spirit, each with its corresponding secret value and its psychological, metaphysical, political, or simply practical- or even pathological- content. But in my case there was neither a moral nor existential disjunctive, what was more, I saw that my two worlds weren't separated in an equal or reciprocal way; neither did one world linger in the shadows or in private as the flip side of the other, the visible one, who knows which; nor would they seek to impose themselves over the other or to merge as one, but force or not, as tends to occur in these cases. Nothing of the sort; they seemed a nearly abnormal example of coexistence, of adaptive tendency and of absolute absence of contrasts. I took all this into consideration, and it seemed worrisome and insoluble. . . But an instant later I resigned myself, thinking that when all was said and done I ought to bow to these conditions, because just as we cannot choose our moment to be born, we also know nothing of the variable worlds we'll inhabit. #Quote by Sergio Chejfec

#158. My morning schedule saw me first in Cannan's office, conferring with my advisor, but our meeting was interrupted within minutes by Narian, who entered without knocking and whose eyes were colder than I had seen them in a long time.
"I thought you intended to control them," he stated, walking toward the captain's desk and standing directly beside the chair in which I sat."
He slammed a lengthy piece of parchment down on the wood surface, an unusual amount of tension in his movements. I glanced toward the open door and caught sight of Rava. She stood with one hand resting against the frame, her calculating eyes evaluating the scene while she awaited orders.
Cannan's gaze went to the parchment, but he did not reach for it, scanning its contents from a distance. Then he looked at Narian, unruffled.
"I can think of a dozen or more men capable of this."
"But you know who is responsible."
Cannan sat back, assessing his opposition. "I don't know with certainty any more than you do. In the absence of definitive proof of guilt on behalf of my son and his friends, I suggest you and your fellows develop a sense of humor." Then the captain's tone changed, becoming more forbidding. "I can prevent an uprising, Narian. This, you'll have to get used to."
Not wanting to be in the dark, I snatched up the parchment in question. My mouth opened in shock and dismay as I silently read its contents, the men waiting for me to finish.
On this Thirtieth Day of Ma #Quote by Cayla Kluver

#159. So dark. Endless darkness, eternal. It was not the absence of light that was so frightening as the absence of thought, of knowledge, of comprehension. Our lives, the lives of the living will go on. The sun shines, the moons rise, we will laugh and talk, and he will know nothing, feel nothing. Nothing.
So final. It will come to us all. It will come to me. #Quote by Tracy Hickman

#160. It occurs to me that my thinking has been faulty: we do not feel God's absence. We feel the absence of all that is lost to God, that which has set itself apart and refuses to return, believing itself to be in exile. #Quote by K.J. Bishop

#161. The most important part of an introduction always occurs in one's absence. #Quote by Kate Zambreno

#162. The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if He be not there, one of the first tokens of His absence will be slothfulness in prayer. #Quote by Charles Spurgeon

#163. *And to keep her immune system strong she followed Dr. Goodhue's advice to abstain from alcohol, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and consume a nourishing diet, low in salt. Page 144
"Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.". Page 204
"I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death ... Is the true measure of the Divine within us." ... "I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.". Page 307
**"With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.". Page 372
**my favorite! #Quote by Alan Brennert

#164. Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. #Quote by Dalai Lama XIV

#165. Love has no value in the absence of truth. #Quote by C.J. Anderson

#166. Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. #Quote by David Foster Wallace

#167. Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680 OBSERVANCE #Quote by Robert Greene

#168. The rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. Alice sweeps back her wet hair. A sudden flinging of sheet lighting and Clara sees Alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain.
They crawl delirious together in the blackness. There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass, pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence. #Quote by Michael Ondaatje

#169. True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it. #Quote by Karl Popper

#170. Without language we have no past, the present is unquantifiable, and we lack a means to recognize and express the paradoxical future challenges of humanity. In absence of a shared language, we cannot understand prior generation's conflicts, desires, and achievements, nor can we communicate with future generations our essential values and the wisdom we garner through undergoing our own socioeconomic crises #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#171. ...it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone. #Quote by Rachel Kushner

#172. who are you when no one is watching
can i trust that person to remain loyal
without my watchful eyes

who are you when my back is turned
can i trust that person to be honest
in my absence #Quote by R.H. Sin

#173. And when Rambo whispered to me, assuring me of my nearest death, I was relieved at my parents' absence, for my death like all death should be a death and an end- no memory, no photograph, no stories and no mother's tears. In death everything should cease. All else is nothing but human vanity and make-believe. #Quote by Rawi Hage

#174. i wonder what it's like. it's impossible to imagine. when u have only known the absence of a thing, how do u construct its feeling in ur mind? #Quote by Nick Lake

#175. And guess what he finds. Nothing. And I mean that literally. Not a de Brogliesque absence of presence but a Tertullian presence of absence. #Quote by Evan Dara

#176. It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. #Quote by John Steinbeck

#177. Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all. #Quote by Hannah Arendt

#178. Decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened. She remembered Lilian reaching for her hand as the foreman got to his feet. In the seconds before the verdict, her own grip had tightened like a vice. Had she been about to urge Lilian forward, or to hold her back? She didn't know. She would never know. And the not knowing wasn't like the absence of something, it was like another burden, a different shape and weight from the last. The lightness left her. She #Quote by Sarah Waters

#179. The ability to make a decision doesn't require the absence of doubt or fear. Both vanish in the presence of responsibility, which emerges naturally in the presence of will. When we know what we truly want, the doubts that blur our decisions, the fears that make us succumb to luck and fate, all become secondary in the face of reason. That's when we understand that our freewill and our options weren't really there. We have created both by desire. The decision is basically conscience asking us to act on our subconscious desires. #Quote by Robin Sacredfire

#180. You're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself. #Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

#181. Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their stars;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their sex (or orientation, if you may);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their age;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their size;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their religion (or choice of nonconformity);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of their colour (or absence thereof);
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of any previous defining moments;
Anyone can be anything, irrespective of anything;
Even if, just, for a while.
It all comes from a place of choice, will, and determination.
And if you, probably, wonder if I blunder when I juggle such trivial and contrasting ideologies,
That's simply because I can be just about anything.
CHECK: Anyone can be anything, but not everything is expedient for everyone. #Quote by Ufuoma Apoki

#182. Peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference. #Quote by Nelson Mandela

#183. To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story. #Quote by Craig D. Lounsbrough

#184. Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. #Quote by Toni Morrison

#185. Only now, he thought, now that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. The crunch of bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain. Waking me with the sound of itself, thrumming when I sleep so deeply it strangles my dreams away. There is nothing for it but to go away from where he is not to where he used to be and might be still. Let the dangle and the writhe see what it is missing; let the pain sing to the dirt where he stepped in the place where he used to be and might be still. I am not going to be healed, or to find the arm that was removed from me. I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we both know what it is for. #Quote by Toni Morrison

#186. One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom #Quote by Byung-Chul Han

#187. Rebelliousness or unconventionality as such do not constitute proof of individualism. Just as individualism does not consist merely of rejecting collectivism, so it does not consist merely of the absence of conformity. A conformist is a man who declares, "It's true because others believe it" - but an individualist is not a man who declares, "It's true because I believe it." An individualist declares, "I believe it because I see in reason that it's true. #Quote by Ayn Rand

#188. One binds the worldly life with bad thoughts; one binds the worldly life with good thoughts. With the absence of thoughts (avichaar) there is moksha [liberation]. #Quote by Dada Bhagwan

#189. Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of control ... They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted. #Quote by Aristotle.

#190. -The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then I would rather be wrong then to be numbered among the majority of the so-called righteous people whose only mandate seems to be controlling people. If a government is against its people expressing themselves, then that government is obviously hiding something criminal from its people and the world, and it is therefore afraid of being exposed and losing whatever power it has. #Quote by Andrew James Pritchard

#191. I just wanted to tell you, how beautiful you were; that day, that night, that life. #Quote by Anthony Liccione

#192. In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy. #Quote by Terryl L. Givens

#193. Meditation is humility - the absence of thought, doubt, and ego. #Quote by Frederick Lenz

#194. So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. #Quote by Slavoj Zizek

#195. The cultural significance of blue, on the other hand, is very limited. As noted earlier, blue is extremely rare as a color of materials in nature, and blue dyes are exceedingly difficult to produce. People in simple cultures might spend a lifetime without seeing objects that are truly blue. Of course, blue is the color of the sky (and, for some of us, the sea). But in the absence of blue materials with any practical significance, the need to find a special name for this great stretch of nothingness is particularly non-pressing. #Quote by Guy Deutscher

#196. All is wholesome in the absence of excess. #Quote by Moliere

#197. Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ("Absence of beauty was like hell") #Quote by Erik Pevernagie

#198. It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea. #Quote by Seneca

#199. The argument from absence of transitional types boils down to the striking fact that such types are always lacking unless they have been found. #Quote by George Gaylord Simpson

#200. The eyes of a psychopath will deceive you, they will destroy you. They will take from you, your innocence, your pride and eventually your soul. These eyes do not see what you and I can see. Behind these eyes, one finds only blackness, the absence of light. These are of a psychopath. #Quote by Dr. Samuel Loomis