“Absence and presence have very primal effects upon us. Too much presence suffocates; a degree of absence spurs our interest. We are marked by the continual desire to possess what we do not have—the object projected by our fantasies. Learn to create some mystery around you, to use strategic absence to make people desire your return, to want to possess you. Dangle in front of others what they are missing most in life, what they are forbidden to have, and they will go crazy with desire. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Overcome this weakness in yourself by embracing your circumstances, your fate.”

— Robert Greene

Chap. 5 : Become an Elusive Object of Desire
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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Robert Greene 111

American author 1959

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

“Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

Amicus Redivivus.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“This is a difference between us: you desire what other people have, while I desire the things I used to have, or think I might have one day.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

“We have parts of our system which are overwhelmed by regulation. It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem. It was despite the presence of regulation you got huge risks built up.”

Timothy Geithner (1961) American central banker and politician

House Financial Services Committee, March 26, 2009 http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/press031309.shtml

“There is not one who speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence," wrote Pascal. "All affection is based on this mutual deception, and few friendships would survive if we knew what our friends were saying of us behind our backs.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

“God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them. Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted. We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things. If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us. Do you want to be happy, my friends? Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.”

John Vianney (1786–1859) French priest and saint

Do You Want to Be Happy?

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

p. 69 http://books.google.com/books?id=HXQKAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA69 of Vol. II of The Complete and Authoritative Edition, 2013, University of California Press
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

“Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Solitude

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