Absence Quotes - Page 31

• The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Giving, Feelings, Looks

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• 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.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Friends, Delight, Length

  Walter Savage Landor (1856). “Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor”, p.151

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• 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.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Mean, Ideas

  "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role". The Observer, June 29, 1958.

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• Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

  Milan Kundera

  Views, Evil, Judging

  "Testaments Betrayed". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

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• If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

  Arthur Miller

  Communication, Responsibility, Expression

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• Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

  Marguerite Duras

  Years, Cities, Paris

  Marguerite Duras (1997). “Outside”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Believe, Compassion, Punishment

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• The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought.

  Henry Steele Commager

  Danger, Orthodox

  "Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent". Book by Henry Steele Commager, 1954.

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• Anarchy, the absence of a master, of a sovereign.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Anarchy, Sovereign, Masters

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (2011). “Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology”, p.134, AK Press

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• The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.

  John Dewey

  Play, Differences, Imagination

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education”, p.240, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, Thoughtful, People

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.263, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.

  Phillips Brooks

  Men, Touching, Christ

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, 1895.

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• Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child's life - the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you'll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

  Jeff Greenfield

  Children, Powerful, Father

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• Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.

  Thomas Boswell

  Baseball, Eye, Giving

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• In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Pantheon, Mythology

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.2, New World Library

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• Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society.

  Earl Warren

  War, Voice, Justice

  Earl Warren (1959). “The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren”

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• The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

  Andre Maurois

  Simple, Jargon, Philosopher

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

  Marcel Proust

  Reality, Attachment, Old Things

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.581, Modern Library

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• Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil.

  Plutarch

  Grief, Evil, Feelings

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• So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Mean, Self, Discipline

  Charles Horton Cooley (2017). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.370, Routledge

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• I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology.

  Camille Paglia

  Successful, Men, Views

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis , because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.

  Karl Barth

  Ideas, Prejudice, Guarantees

  Karl Barth (2004). “Church Dogmatics: The doctrine of the word of God (2 pts.)”, p.469, A&C Black

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• This absence of similarity among military questions naturally brings out the inability of memory to solve them; also the sterility of invariable forms, such as figures, geometrical drawings ( épures ), plans ( schémas ), etc. One only right solution imposes itself:;: namely, the application, varying according to circumstances, of fixed principles.

  Ferdinand Foch

  Memories, Military, Drawing

  Ferdinand Foch (1920). “The Principles of War”

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• Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.

  Barack Obama

  Peace, Rights, Dignity

  Nobel Prize for Peace Acceptance Speech and Lecture, delivered 10 December 2009, Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway

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• The Mutakallemim... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e.g. , blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced.

  Maimonides

  Sight, Opposites, Two

  Moses Maimonides (2016). “Guide for the perplexed”, p.1023, Moses Maimonides

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