Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
My dear, the duty that devolved wholly on you in my absence of guiding and expanding the minds of our dear children is a laborious one and a responsible one.
Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning – in other words, of absurdity – the more energetically meaning is sought.
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
I feel many times we do all the hard work, but in the absence of smart work, we do not get the desired results.
I wish you to inform the Court that my absence, though deliberate, is not intended in any way to be disrespectful. Nor is it prompted by any fear of the punishment which might be inflicted on me.
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.
A lot of people pulled me up after ‘Trainspotting’ for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.
Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is.
The appointing power vested in the president imposes delicate and onerous duties. So far as it is possible to be informed, I shall make honesty, capacity, and fidelity indispensable prerequisites to the disposal of office, and the absence of either of these qualities shall be deemed sufficient cause for removal.
In the absence of a written constitution, we still rely far too heavily in the U.K. on unwritten and unenforceable ‘constitutional conventions.’
Absence of occupation is not rest; A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.
At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.
A sister is the one person you can call in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep or the one who doesn’t want to hear about your problems unless you’re ready to do something about them. She’s the one who is there when you need her or the one whose absence when you need her hurts the most.
The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country, and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
In the history of women’s tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.
Being brave isn’t the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.
There can be little doubt that absence from work, and inefficient work, are frequently due to intemperance.
Straight couples don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage.
In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
In the absence of relative equality – quid pro quo – a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.
I regard gratitude as an asset and its absence a major interpersonal flaw.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
I can’t think of a single example of two mature democracies going to war with each other in the 20th century. It’s where there was an absence of democracy and a breakdown of democracy that we finish up with these wars.
So many people condemn me for risk taking, but I find it sort of hypocritical because everybody takes risks. Even the absence of activity could be viewed as a risk. If you sit on the sofa for your entire life, you’re running a higher risk of getting heart disease and cancer.
For many Americans, including many who are employed, going to the doctor when they fall ill or become injured may not be an option because of the absence of health insurance.
In the absence of any short term in common use to represent all desirable things, or things that satisfy human wants, we may use the term Goods for that purpose.
Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict – alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.
The absence of doll babies in my toy chest didn’t seriously influence my later decision not to become a mother; rather, I disdained Hasbro’s Baby Alive wetting doll because I was already the kind of girl who would grow up to be childless by choice.
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists… When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.
Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.
In France, a woman may forget that she is neither young nor handsome; for the absence of these claims to attention does not expose her to be neglected by the male sex.
Freedom is not the absence of obligation or restraint, but the freedom of movement within healthy, chosen parameters.
What is newest to one in foreign countries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while.
I’m constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.
I am very lucky to have a wife who supports me, but the absence from my children was difficult from the moment I took a very difficult decision to have a career which requires so much dedication and focus, just like raising children.
The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
During Grover Cleveland’s second term, in the 1890s, the White House deceived the public by dismissing allegations that surgeons had removed a cancerous growth from the President’s mouth; a vulcanized-rubber prosthesis disguised the absence of much of Cleveland’s upper left jaw and part of his palate.
Peace must be more than the absence of war.
I think of emotional well-being as a resource within each of us that allows us to do more and to perform better. That doesn’t mean just the absence of mental illness. It’s the presence of positive emotions that allows us to be resilient in the face of adversity.
I love actors that are brave, that are courageous. And courage to me is not the absence of fear, it’s the presence of fear, and they go to places that really scare them, because as an audience, that’s where you feel danger.
Frankly speaking, ever since my debut, I have been offered cop roles. However, I never felt confident about pulling them off, probably due to my short physique or the absence of the required traits in me.
I was nerdy and really into computers. I was a good student until my senior year, when I started traveling and had a lot of absences.
The EPA code needs to set forth a clear, regular, and rational system of penalties for violations of its code, with the amount of the penalty set in proportion to the amount of pollutant released by a given defendant, and no penalties imposed in the absence of any pollutant released.
Increased sympathy for an Islamist cause, lack of integration, and the absence of acceptance of Muslims into British society makes it harder for Muslims to challenge Islamism and tough for non-Muslims to understand it.
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
I had taken time off from ‘F.I.R.’ for three months. But its makers didn’t like my absence.
My experiment in money exchange was the temptation to set up a bank. The absence of any Islamic banking was also another factor in establishing Al-Rajhi Bank, which is now the world’s biggest Islamic lender by market value.
White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
