Absence Quotes

A type conveys absence and presence, pleasure and pain. A cipher has a double meaning, one clear, and one in which it is said that the meaning is hidden.

Blaise Pascal

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Elizabeth Bowen

Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.

Alexander Pope

Greater things are believed of those who are absent.

Tacitus

When delicate and feeling souls are separated, there is not a feature in the sky, not a movement of the elements, not an aspiration of the breeze, but hints some cause for a lover's apprehension.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

William Shakespeare

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

Sir Matthew Hale

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.

Thomas Kempis

Our hours in love have wings; in absence, crutches.

Colley Cibber

No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.

Jean de la Bruyere

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

Ouida

Reporters used to be blue-collar at the Globe now, it's practically required that you have a trust fund.

Howie Carr

The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

Oscar Wilde

If either the absence or the presence of novelty is equally annoying, it would hardly seem that either could be the true cause of despair.

Bertrand Russell

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars --all the beauties of creation.

Victor Hugo

I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Brendan F. Behan

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

Thomas Fuller

Woman absent is woman dead.

Ambrose Bierce