Absence Quotes - Page 27

• Nature without learning is blind, learning apart from nature is fractional, and practice in the absence of both is aimless.

  Plutarch

  Education, Practice, Blind

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• We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Thinking, Guarantees, May

  Clifton Fadiman (1957). “Any Number Can Play”, Cleveland : World Publishing Company

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• What is slander? A verdict of "guilty" pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defence or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge.

  Philibert Joseph Roux

  Doors, Judging, Guilty

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• There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire: when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage? Hark, do not castrate thyself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust.

  Rumi

  Self, Lust, Desire

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• The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

  Antonio Machado

  Vices, Add, Littles

  Antonio Machado, Antonio Fernández Ferrer “Juan de Mairena”, Univ of California Press

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• Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

  Andre Breton

  Mean, Psychics, Moral

  "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Book by Andre Breton, 1924.

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• Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Men, Long, Coercion

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2011). “The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment”, p.11, Anchor

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• What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light.

  Leopold Sedar Senghor

  Pain, Sleep, Passion

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• Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services, and waiting rooms. The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence - that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living.

  John Ralston Saul

  Believe, Airplane, Self Confidence

  John Ralston Saul (2002). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.211, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Real, Mean

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.

  Alexander Sutherland Neill

  Family, Children, Finest

  Alexander Sutherland Neill (1969). “Summerhill: a radical appoach to education”

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• The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .

  Audre Lorde

  Heterosexuality Is, World, Gaps

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.111, Crossing Press

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• Real love is the complete absence of any negative feelings towards anyone.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Love, Real, Feelings

  Swami Jnanamritananda Puri, Amma, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (2014). “Eternal Wisdom: Upadeshamritam Volume 2”, p.211, M A Center

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• Absence makes the heart grow fonder and tears are only rain to make love grow.

  Ray Charles

  Rain, Heart, Sadness

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• There 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 Rustin

  Strong, Rights, Movement

  Bayard Rustin (2003). “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin”, p.196, Simon and Schuster

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• In 1916 I was discharged from military service, or rather, given a sort of leave of absence on the understanding that I might be recalled within a few months. And so I was a free man, at least for a while.

  George Grosz

  Military, Men, Understanding

  George Grosz (1982). “The autobiography of George Grosz: a small yes and a big no”

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• It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?

  William Booth

  Stupidity, Battle, Investing

  William Booth (2014). “In Darkest England and the Way Out”, p.44, Cambridge University Press

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• For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

  Jacques Attali

  Men, Twenties, Essentials

  Jacques Attali (1985). “Noise: The Political Economy of Music”, p.3, Manchester University Press

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• To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Heart, Responsibility, Men

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• 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.

  Joko Beck

  Goal, Enlightenment, Achieve

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• I actually had kind of one of those crazy experiences where when I hit, it was black out excruciating pain, and then white out absence of pain, and the subconscience thought that I want to go back.

  Brooke Burns

  Pain, Crazy, White

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• Funk is the absence of any and everything you can think of, but the very essence of all that is. And saying that, I'm saying funk is anything that we create in our minds that we want to do, what we want to be, but we don't have the resources.

  Bootsy Collins

  Thinking, Essence, Mind

  "Bootsy Collins Brings Back The Funk". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. May 19, 2011.

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• In the history of women's tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.

  Lindsay Davenport

  Player, Long, Tennis

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• Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Baby, Science, Long

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1998). “The Affluent Society”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is a custom often practiced by seafaring people to throw a bottle overboard, with a paper, stating the time and place at which it is done. In the absence of other information as to currents, that afforded by these mute little navigators is of great value.

  Matthew Fontaine Maury

  Time, Science, People

  Matthew Fontaine Maury (1858). “Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts”, p.91

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