Pastoral Resources

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

The situation in the region is flammable and may explode at any moment, because of the crucial events and because of the absence of justice in executing the international legitimacy resolutions, regarding the Israeli Arab cause and the oppression on Palestinians by Israelis.

To observe people in conflict is a necessary part of a child's education. It helps him to understand and accept his own occasional hostilities and to realize that differing opinions need not imply an absence of love.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

It would be hard to ignore the absence of democracy in any Arab nation.

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state.

Absence from those we love is self from self - a deadly banishment.

I dote on his very absence.

Tact is one of the first mental virtues, the absence of it is fatal to the best talent.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

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

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.