This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Virtue cannot be fully attained without liberty and the absence of liberty proves that virtue in its full protection is wanting. Therefore a man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish." - John of Salisbury NULL
"What is slander? A verdict of “guilty” pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defense or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge." - Joseph Roux
"When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain." - Kahlil Gibran
"Nature without learning is blind, learning apart from nature is fractional, and practice in the absence of both is aimless." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Peace is not just the absence of war. It involves mutual respect and confidence between peoples and nations. It involves collaboration and binding agreements. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
"The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul caused by the spirits which dispose it to wish for the future the things which it represents to itself as agreeable. Thus we do not only desire the presence of the absent good, but also the conservation of the present, and further, the absence of evil, both of that which we already have, and of that which we believe we might experience in time to come." - René Descartes
"It is not possible to form any other notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue." - Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL
"The absence of the ignorant is never regretted." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity." - William Hazlitt
"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." - Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
"The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity. " - Edna St. Vincent Millay
"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." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), 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." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"To speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need of every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"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." - George Frederick Will
"Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement." - Gerald G. Jampolsky
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being and is subject to the law of the mental unity of crowds." - Gustave Le Bon
"The secret of life is balance, and the absence of balance is life’s destruction." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself." - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
"Understanding transforms, it does not sublimate. If you understand, anger disappears and the same energy becomes compassion. Not that you sublimate: anger simply disappears, and the energy that was involved, invested in anger, is released and becomes compassion. When you understand hate, hate disappears and the same energy becomes love. Love is not against hate -- it is absence of hate." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state" - Joris-Karl "J.K." Huysmans, pseudonym for Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans
"Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates. " - Jean de La Bruyère
"Sorrow causes more absence of mind and confusion than so-called levity. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"Distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it—for separation from those we love shows us, by the loss, their real value and dearness to us." - Jeremiah Brown Howell
"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
"The human being is uniquely graced with the ability to search the soul and reflect, For what purpose am I alive? Does my life have a meaning, a reason? Is there a need for my existence? Will anything on earth be impaired by my disappearance? Would my absence create a vacuum in the world? And if we say that there would be a void and an impairment in the world, and that this means that my life has value beyond its simple existence, is it incumbent upon me to fulfill a purpose in this life? Do I exist that I might build or restore?" - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. " - John Robert Seeley, fully Sir John Robert Seeley
"Virtue does not consist in the absence of the passions, but in the control of them. " - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe." - L. Ron Hubbard, fully Lafayette Ron Hubbard
"If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency." - Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
"According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will." -
"Like everyone who possesses something precious in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts, a new state which it was impossible to foresee in the old." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born /a hundred million years /and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes." -
"Memory may be but a power of coming to the treasury of Fact, A momentary self-desertion, an absence in spirit from the now, An actual coursing hither and thither, by the mind, slipped from its leash, A life, as in the mystery of dreams, spent within the limits of a moment." - Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
"Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much is the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another. Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it. In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose. Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise." - Max Picard
"Better the absence of greatness than the establishing of a false greatness by assumed humility. Not only do these efforts at humility on man's part not express strength, they are, on the contrary, expressions of modesty born of weakness, which springs from a lack of knowledge of the truth of Reality. Beware of modesty. Modesty, under the cloak of humility, invariably leads one into the clutches of self-deception. Modesty breeds egoism, and man eventually succumbs to pride through assumed humility. The greatest greatness and the greatest humility go hand in hand naturally and without effort." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"Today, peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to cooperation and common creativity among countries and nations. Peace is movement towards globality and universality of civilization. Never before has the idea that peace is indivisible been so true as it is now. Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences. And, ideally, peace means the absence of violence. It is an ethical value." - Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" -
"The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" -