Absence Of Feelings Quotes & Sayings

The absence of feeling bad isn't enough to make you happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good — Gretchen Rubin

And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages ... — Milorad Pavic

I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man. The adult who has learned to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts notices the absence of these thoughts in a child, and therefore comes to believe that the child lacks these experiences, too. Yet rarely in my life have I felt and suffered as deeply as at that time. — Hermann Hesse

Faith is not merely "feeling good about God" but a conscious choice, even in the utter absence of feelings or external encouragements to obey His word when He says, "Trust Me." This choice has nothing to do with mood but is a deliberate act of laying hold of the character of God whom circumstances never change. — Elisabeth Elliot

Good feelings, when they depart, recommend to us the pursuit of virtue in their absence; indeed it is for our growth in virtue that they are given to us. The bad ones suggest that when they depart, virtue does too, and they leave us dispirited. In brief, good feelings do not call for love, but only for us to love the One who sends them, while the bad ones want us to love them above all things. Good feelings impel us to seek virtue; bad ones to seek feelings themselves. — Francis De Sales

Tears is the voice of heart in pain, in absence of feelings one don't care what you share. — Kishore Bansal

TEN RULES FOR WINNING THE GAME OF CONFIDENCE The actions of confidence come first; the feelings of confidence come later. Genuine confidence is not the absence of fear; it is a transformed relationship with fear. Negative thoughts are normal. Don't fight them; defuse them. Self-acceptance trumps self-esteem. True success is living by your values. Hold your values lightly, but pursue them vigorously. Don't obsess about the outcome; get passionate about the process. Don't fight your fear: allow it, befriend it, and channel it. Failure hurts - but if we're willing to learn, it's a wonderful teacher. The key to peak performance is total engagement in the task. — Russ Harris

Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil. — Plutarch

Another strange thing was how absence had intensified my feelings for her. How I craved the sweet everyday reality of just being with her, of having a mundane conversation about how our days had been. The gentle but unbettered comfort of coexistence. I couldn't think of a better purpose for the universe than for her to be in it. — Matt Haig

In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's. — Gayle Forman

It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. — Kerry Kletter

Many feelings are simply too good to last
using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence — George MacDonald

Her absence had felt like torture
almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him. — Stieg Larsson

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling. — Lisa Kleypas

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality - the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. — Alice Miller

If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp ... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment. — Arthur Miller

Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances. — William Hazlitt

Her head had turned quickly away ... Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence. — Gregory Maguire

After God, who is the central core pillar to any Christian marriage, there are four important marital relationship foundations. These are:

* Self-Esteem - if you don't love yourself you will find it almost impossible to accept love from others.

* Friendship - a strong friendship will sustain your marriage even when feelings of love are harder to find.

* Laughter - it will improve your quality of life, your health and your relationships

* Romance - feeling close to your partner can be the glue which holds your relationship together through the rough patches, but the absence of romance causes a void that problems will easily fill. — Karen M Gray

And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. Eventually I just checked out of the world altogether, leaving behind only my body, like a snail abandoning its shell. Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost. — Kerry Kletter

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs. — Philip Larkin

In all human love it must be realized that every man promises a woman, and every woman promises a man that which only God alone can give, namely, perfect happiness. One of the reasons why so many marriages are shipwrecked is because as the young couple leave the altar, they fail to realize that human feelings tire and the enthusiasm of the honeymoon is not the same as the more solid happiness of enduring human love. One of the greatest trials of marriage is the absence of solitude. In the first moments of human love, one does not see the little hidden deformities which later on appear. — Fulton J. Sheen

Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did not feel his presence beside me-only his absence." — Edwin Morris

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. — Susan Sontag

We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize - in the main, or even exclusively - the one or the other of these aims. — Sigmund Freud

We communicate happiness to others not often by great acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, but by the absence of fault-finding and censure, by being ready to sympathize with their notions and feelings, instead of forcing them to sympathize with ours. — Adam Clarke

When the first force, social feeling and community expectation, is ignored or affronted, the person concerned will reveal certain aggressive character traits: vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, playing God, or greed; or nonaggressive traits: withdrawal, anxiety, timidity, or absence of social graces. When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet the forces also create an intensity or tension that can give tremendous energy. — Tom Butler-Bowdon

The feeling of love is measured by the extent of missing the feverish state in which the absence of the other plunges us — Francine Noel

They were good friends, weren't they? The best of friends. She ought to be able to walk into his room and ask him the reason for his absence this evening - and the reason for his absence from her bed.
But she couldn't, because it was all a sham, their friendship, at least on her part, a disguise for her true feelings, an awful solace for not being his one and only.
A thing without wings. — Sherry Thomas

He would like to burrow under the earth like a bulb, like a root, to where it is still warm. To hibernate with his thoughts and feelings. To remain silent with a shrivelling mouth. He wishes that all the statements, insults, promises he has uttered would become invalid, forgotten by everyone and he himself forgotten too.
But no sooner is he secured in the silence, no sooner does he fancy that he has wrapped himself up like a chrysalis, than he is no longer right. A wet, cold wind blows his absence of expectations around the corner, over a flower-stall filled with evergreens and flowers for the dead. And suddenly he is holding in his hands the snowdrops that he didn't want to buy
he who wanted to go empty-handed! The bells of the snowdrops begin to ring wildly and soundlessly, and he goes to where his ruin awaits him. Filled with expectation as never before, with the expectation and the desire for salvation accumulated through all the years. — Ingeborg Bachmann

Pay attention to when the cart is getting before the horse. Notice when a painful initiation leads to irrational devotion, or when unsatisfying jobs start to seem worthwhile. Remind yourself pledges and promises have power, as do uniforms and parades. Remember in the absence of extrinsic rewards you will seek out or create intrinsic ones. Take into account [that] the higher the price you pay for your decisions the more you value them. See that ambivalence becomes certainty with time. Realize that lukewarm feelings become stronger once you commit to a group, club, or product. Be wary of the roles you play and the acts you put on, because you tend to fulfill the labels you accept. Above all, remember the more harm you cause, the more hate you feel. The more kindness you express, the more you come to love those you help. — Anonymous

And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. — Milorad Pavic

in loving relationships the absence of regularly reinforcing warm feelings automatically breeds disappointment and resentment as a by-product of frustrated expectations and desires. — John W. Jacobs

A tree, young or old, if admired, remains a definite vision, and when after long absence it is visited again, the meeting place is approached with feelings of pleasure and curiosity as to how one's friend had fared, even with thoughts as to what changes may come to tree or visitor since first they met; this may seem like a foolish sentiment - perhaps it is. But, after all, sentiment is mingled with most that's best in life. — Charles Eley

She thought he cared too much. Sometimes Dolores could see that her son felt what other people were feeling. He was sympathetic, she knew that. But Silas managed to make his feelings about others into another kind of absence. You'd laugh, Silas would laugh. You'd cry, he'd start crying. It was like he was tuning in to a radio station. It took a moment for the distant signal to lock in, but once it did, he'd be right in sync with you. Only when he got angry, or hurt, did the signal fail and he'd become very present indeed, and very annoyed to have his calm broken. Then it was nothing but static. — Ari Berk

The genocide (in Rwanda) was a collective act. What made it possible, what made that final political crime possible, was the absence, the erasure, of seeing the other. Of knowing, of feeling, of being with the other. And when that's removed, then politics
can become genocidal. — James Orbinski

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith. — Jeffrey Kluger

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard's sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It is the teacher's and the lawmaker's responsibility to allow the child to express his feelings about growing up. What happens to a child at that particular age? It is a terribly vulnerable time, and if we provide youths with an environment to
be free, to be expressive, without embarrassing them, without shaming them, they would grow up to be healthy, compassionate adults. Instead, if we force them to "belong, belong, belong," they all become repressed. There is a complete absence of options. — Cyril Wong

Real love is the complete absence of any negative feelings towards anyone. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Am I capable of deceiving my friend? Julien asked himself peevishly. This being, for whom hypocrisy and an absence of all sympathy were the usual methods of protecting himself, could not bear, this time, the thought of the slightest trickiness in dealing with a man for whom he had friendly feelings. — Stendhal

Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description! — Alfred Binet

He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable. — Friedrich Nietzsche