A Quote by James Joyce

Absence, the highest form of presence.

James Joyce

Quote Topics

Absence Form Highest Highest Form Presence

Quote Author

James Joyce
Irish - Novelist
February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death.

Jess Bowen

When a person disappears, everything becomes impregnated with that person's presence. Every single object as well as every space becomes a reminder of absence, as if absence were more important than presence.

Doris Salcedo

It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

Mark Epstein

Appreciation is the highest form of prayer, for it acknowledges the presence of good wherever you shine the light of your thankful thoughts.

Alan Cohen

What can be seen on earth points to neither the total absence nor the obvious presence of divinity, but to the presence of a hidden God. Everything bears this mark.

Blaise Pascal

Play is an expression of God's presence in the world; one clear sign of God's absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter.

Mike Yaconelli

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

John Berger

The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom.

Paramahansa Yogananda

The key to the many is often the one; it is how you regard and talk about the one in that one's absence or presence that communicates to the many how you would regard and talk about them in their presence or absence.

Stephen Covey

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

Jackie Kay

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel.

Ivan Chtcheglov

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.

Herbert Spencer

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

Jonathan Safran Foer

As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.