Great Throughts Treasury

"God’ absence is an illusion." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Anarchism is [not] synonymous with chaos. Translated from the Greek, anarchism means the absence of rulers, or orders – not of rules or order. Order emanates naturally from the free cooperation of persons in a community." - Michael Kane

"The secret of life is balance, and the absence of balance is life’s destruction." -

"Peace is not merely the absence of war, but the presence of justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men and women." - Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL

"Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still." - William Penn

"They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal. " - William Penn

"Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire." -

"Absence lessens moderate passions, it is more on account of their weakness than our strength." -

"The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"Temperance is not the absence of passion, but is the transfiguring of passion into wholeness. Without it... you will have the senses usurping sovereignty and excluding the spirit; you will have them deciding good and evil and excluding God." - Gerald Vann

"Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It also is the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passions and uncensorable appetites. From the need to resist, manage and censor the passions there flows the need to do so in the interest of some ends rather than others. Hence freedom requires reflective choice about the ends of life." -

"Respect is not fear and awe; it...is the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me." -

"Anger is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Its absence means indifference - the most disastrous of all human failings." - Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather, the judgment that something else is more important than fear." - Ambrose Redmoon, pen name for James Neil Hollingsworth

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ... Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist." - Donald Rumsfeld

"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature." - Alfred North Whitehead

"The happiness of a man in this life does not consists in the absence but in the mastery of passions." -

"The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions." -

"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation." -

"The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues." - Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz

"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?" - Arthur Asher Miller

"Friends are made and kept three ways. First, by honoring them in their presence. Second, by saying good of them in their absence. Third, by serving them in their needs." - Author Unknown NULL

"Peace is not the absence of conflict from life, but the ability to cope with it." - Author Unknown NULL

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."" - Author Unknown NULL

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." -

"Peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character." -

"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

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is, then, only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart. I set it down as a fact that if all men know what each said to the other, there would not be four friends in the world." - Blaise Pascal

"Few friendships would endure if each party knew what his friend said about him in his absence, even when speaking sincerely and dispassionately." - Blaise Pascal

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great." - Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy Bussy-Rabutin

"Chance implies an absolute absence of any principle." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

"Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness; perfect glory is the absence of glory." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

"Our hours in love have wings; in absence crutches." - Colley Cibber

"In the absence of discriminating thoughts, the mind as we know it ceases to exist. Our suffering - our feeling of discomfort, alienation, loneliness - arises because we create a dualistic way of perceiving everything that separates us from the external. When we view the so-called external phenomenal world as distinct from ourselves, then fear arises, fear that we will lose our lives, that we may not continue to exist. Out of that fear come anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, aversion, attachment - all kinds of clinging. All our problems arise out of seeing ourselves as separate entities. We cling to what we perceive as me; my physical body and my ideas, my mind, my thoughts, my understanding, my beliefs, my concepts, my opinions." - Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi

"They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war - as though the absence of war was the same as peace." - Dorothy Thompson

"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." - Dorothy Thompson

"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." - Dorothy Thompson

"Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man." - Edmund Burke

"Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from the lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions." - Eric Hoffer

"The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain." - Francis Hutcheson

"Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it." - Hannah More

"People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself." -

"Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind." - Jawaharlal Nehru

"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." - Jawaharlal Nehru