«It is just as cowardly to judge an absent person as it is wicked to strike a defenseless one. Only the ignorant and narrow-minded gossip, for they speak of persons instead of things.»

«Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.»

«No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools / no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class / no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.»

«Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be.»

«Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; for, thus friends absent speak»

«New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.»

«Never find fault with the absent.»

«Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.»

«Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love.»

«Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.»