Failure is not the absence of success. Failure is the neglect of trying.
What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.
A great man once wrote, "Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire. " If only I were as eloquent as Mr. de la Rochefoucauld. . . I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I want you. And I need your kiss. And your touch on my skin like a man needs water. Always.
Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe.
Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.
True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.
We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.
In the absence of wake-up calls, many of us never really confront the critical issues of life.
No bodyguard can ever protect us from the gossips; because in the case of gossip, we are beaten in our absence!
This is the tragedy and woe of the hour--that we neglect the most important One who could possibly be in our midst--the Holy Spirit of God. Then, in order to make up for His absence, we have to do something to keep up our own spirits.
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
You left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence or in absence.
If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. . . . The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.
The first and most important step is to realize that, as my mother used to say, fearlessness isn't the absence of fear, but the mastery of fear. It's not that you never have fear, but that you don't let your fears stop you.
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.
The surest test of discipline is its absence.
Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc. , as if they possessed self-sufficient being.
True Joy is not the absence of pain but the sanctifying, sustaining presence of the Lord Jesus in the midst of the pain
We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel.
When the president acts in absence of a congressional grant of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers. When the president takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.