. . . personal soundness is not an absence of problems but a way of reacting to them.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.
Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.
Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum.
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Love is the absence of judgment.
In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touched starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity - than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.
You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.
The collapse of good conscience and the absence of accountability and public scrutiny have led to crimes against humanity and violations of international law.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Real bliss is the absence of the wanting of bliss
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.
Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
The presence of many does not and cannot replace the absence of one. That is love.
