Among Jews, there is an absence of drunkenness, always a fruitful source of domestic strife and misconduct.
It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts.
When money disappears, we soon understand the power of absence.
We have no Constitution which functions in the absence of a moral people
Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
I suppose even Dictators have their chummy moments, when they put their feet up and relax with the boys, but it was plain from the outset that if Roderick Spode had a sunnier side, he had not come with any idea of exhibiting it now. His manner was curt. One sensed the absence of the bonhomous note. . . . Here he laid a hand on my shoulder, and I can't remember when I have experienced anything more unpleasant. Apart from what Jeeves would have called the symbolism of the action, he had a grip like the bite of a horse. "Did you say 'Oh yes?'" he asked. "Oh no," I assured him.
Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.
Laughing faces do not mean that there is absence of sorrow! But it means that they have the ability to deal with it
Letters to absence can a voice impart, And lend a tongue when distance gags the heart.
Just the absence of loneliness. That's love enough.
I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.
The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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.
My father's death took me to a place I had never been and a place I had never left. In his absence, I've had to rely more on myself.
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.
But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?. . . How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?
Peace is neither the absence of war nor the presence of a disarmament agreement. Peace is a change of heart.
Father’s silence is not merely the absence of sound. It’s a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. It twists in your gut like a worm. Silence clawed at my throat. It left a taste of burnt matches.
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.