“Sometimes, when one person is absent, the whole world seems depopulated.” Alphonse Marie Lamartine’s tender words capture the quiet ache of missing someone who fills our days with light. These quotes explore love, longing, and the way absence deepens the heart’s awareness. ✨

Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire. ~ François de La Rochefoucauld

Absence makes the heart go wander. ~ Betsy Barr

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, but it sure heats up the blood. ~ Elizabeth Ashley

The heart may think it knows better; the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1966)

When my self is not with you, it is nowhere. ~ Heloise

Is not absence death to those who love? ~ Alexander Pope

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great. ~ Comte DeBussy Rabutin

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity. ~ Ouida

Our most memorable days are marked by an absence of control. ~ Patricia Smith

Speak not evil of the absent for it is unjust. ~ George Washington, Rules of Civility

A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights of our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change. ~ Earl Nightingale

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. ~ Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. ~ Thomas Haynes Bayly, Isle of Beauty

Achilles absent was Achilles still. ~ Homer