Absence

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Quotes regarding Absence

[edit] Sourced

• Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

• Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.
  • François, duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665)

• Greater things are believed of those who are absent.
  • Tacitus, Histories (A.D. 104-109)

• Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
  • Alphonse de Lamartine, Premieres Meditations Poetiques (1820)

• The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.
  • Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)

• 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.
  • Colette, The Captain, Earthly Paradise (1966)

• Say, is not absence death to those who love?
  • Alexander Pope, Pastorals: Autumn

• No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
  • Aphra Behn, The Rover, Part I, Act I, sc. ii (1677)

• The absent are like children; they are helpless to defend themselves.
  • Charles Reade, Foul Play (1869) ch. 44

• The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.
  • Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack July 1736

• To-day man is, and to-morrow he will be seen no more. And being removed out of sight, quickly also he is out of mind.
  • Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (c.1418) Book I, ch. 23

[edit] Attributed

• Absence and death are the same--only that in death there is no suffering.
  • Walter Savage Landor

• The absent are always in the wrong.
  • English proverb recorded in George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum (1651)

• The absent shall not be made heir.
  • Latin proverb

• They are good that are away.
  • Scottish proverb