Quotes about emptiness

Tao Lin - Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels 'i need to go read my blog to find out what my politics are

Aurora Whittet - Bloodmark

I wanted desperately to be part of our pack I felt a hole inside myself where my pack should have been.

Swami Dhyan Giten - Silence is the Way: The Teachings of Buddha

Only love can dispel hate From Satsang with Giten on Buddha,November 12, 2015, in StockholmBuddha says: SPEAK OR ACT WITH AN IMPURE MINDAND TROUBLE WILL FOLLOW YOUAS THE WHEEL FOLLOWS THE OX THAT DRIVES THE CART When Buddha uses the concept "impure mind", he means mind.Mind is impure, and no-mind is pure.SPEAK OR ACT WITH AN IMPURE MIND means to speak or act from the mind. AND TROUBLE WILL FOLLOW YOU means that misery and suffering is the result of the mind, because the mind means unawareness. M

Michael Finkel - The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values a

Sui Ishida - 東京喰種トーキョーグール:re 11 [Tokyo Guru:re 11]

Takizawa: something that was left in my care. give it back to Amon for me. see you, Goat's King.Kaneki: I'm not taking It.Takizawa: Its just a small chain and yet It feels so heavy to me... fine whatever.Kaneki: Takizawa, Its because you'r completely empty inside that if we don't tie you down with a chain you'll go off and die.

James S.A. Corey - Cibola Burn

His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence.

Ahmed Mostafa -

Pour your heart out to me and fill my emptiness with your grief.

Denice Envall -

To me, you were more than just a person. You were a place where I finally felt at home.

Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love—to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically.

John Cage - M: Writings '67-'72

Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.

Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?

Do not live for emptiness, do not waste your evaporating life pursuing the vanities of life.

Sunday Adelaja - spending time or investing time?

There is no one who was supposed to come to this world and leave empty.

Val Uchendu -

Cold feet under a warm blanket, steam over an empty mug--rain splatters on dry window pane--open journals of closed memories... tears of laughter and joy of pain... schmaltz of diametric morning.

C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

Candace Bushnell - Lipstick Jungle

The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching

Sunday Adelaja -

Employment leaves you bare and empty

Sunday Adelaja -

For every day spent at a job, you empty your life

Sunday Adelaja -

Giving a piece of your life daily through employment makes you empty

Andrew Wilson - Ζωή στο σκοτάδι

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a you

Guy de Maupassant - Complete Works

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptin

Ahmed Mostafa -

I have to convince myself every night that I love you before I go to sleep lest I wake up empty.

L.M. Browning - Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations

From time to time, we all must go unto a landscape—be it inner or outer landscape—where there are no hiding places. Allowing the stark awe and silence to aid us in both communing and confronting the depth of ourselves. We fear emptiness because we know that within those places of nothingness we will come face-to-face with who we are and gaze into the internal mirror. But what is the alternative? Shall we go our entire life without hearing our own voice . . . without ever having met who we are wh

Ashlee Willis - A Wish Made of Glass

Yet something else trickles in between the cracks of this despairing thought. The hope of something to fill that emptiness. The hope that, perhaps, I have found it already. And suddenly hope is a thing alive, soaring in me. Its wings beat against my ribs, wild with the promise of joy.

Evy Michaels -

When the days become darkThe nights become coldAnd all there is, is an empty soulBelieve you can escape your plightEven when relief is out of sightDon't you dare give up the fightDon't you dare

Woody Allen -

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

Emmoduro -

With great emptiness and a vacuum none can fill we push on through the shadows, complied to walk in the darkness and never allowed to appreciate it with the hope of a light unseen but we will still get there.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.

Sanober Khan -

Poems can getsleepless tooand becomethe loneliest thingin the universe.

J.D. Stroube - Caged in Darkness

There are people in the world, who are just wrong, and then there are the masses of population that are right, or at the very least they lie in the veil of between. I on the other hand, do not belong to any group. I don’t exist. It’s not that I don’t have substance; I have a body like everyone else. I can feel the fire when it burns against my skin, the rain when it caresses my face and the breeze as it fingers my hair. I have all the senses that other people do. I am just empty, inside.

Alice Hoffman - The Dovekeepers

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

Sunday Adelaja - Create Your Own Net Worth

No man was born empty, every man was born with a worth.

Liezi - Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressu

Swami Dhyan Giten -

These are the three stages of enlightenment, the three glimpses of satori. 1. The first stage enlightenment:A Glimpse of the WholeThe first stage of enlightenment is short glimpse from faraway of the whole. It is a short glimpse of being. The first stage of enlightenment is when, for the first time, for a single moment the mind is not functioning. The ordinary ego is still present at the first stage of enlightenment, but you experience for a short while that there is something beyond the ego. Th

Vladimir Bartol - Alamut

That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoner

Vladimir Bartol - Alamut

There's one other thing I'd like to remind you of, my dear. There've been many times when you've sworn to me that after all that life has dealt you, it was no longer possible for you to believe in anything. I replied that both life and my studies had led me to the same conclusion. I asked you, 'What is a person permitted, once he's realized that truth is unattainable and consequently doesn't exist for him?' Do you remember your answer?""I do, ibn Sabbah. I said something like this: 'If a person

Thomas Pynchon -

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Kimberly Novosel -

I decided I would fill the emptiness in me with God and with paint.

Jeff Lindsay - Dexter Is Dead

Hope is for people who can't see the Truth.

Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Fred Rogers - The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no j

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved.

Peter Craig - Hot Plastic

Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More

Jean-Paul Sartre - The Age of Reason

But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.

Jackson Pearce - Fathomless

It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.

Drexel Deal - The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? No

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

We are trying to find something to feel the void. It is only God who can fill the void.

Vikrmn - Corpkshetra

The emptiness that fills in when once-the-beloved says, "Who are you?

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

Every soul craves to fill the void. Only God can satisfy and set us free.

Terry Pratchett -

Too much alleged ‘fantasy’ is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -

When your strength goes down, remember God is up to uplift you!

Sanober Khan -

my dear, I have nothing to say.my heart burns like the evening sky.

LeAnne Mechelle - Write like no one is reading 2

I'm chasing a decade old ghost. Searching beneath the rafters of a cobweb-filled haven lined with old memories which my brain cannot accept are dead. The light of nostalgia is burning bright inside my heart. Ignoring the emptiness around me, and hoping for a resurrection of love.

S.J. Watson -

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

Erik Pevernagie -

Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )

Roshan Sharma -

You can only become the observer of life, if you can perceive the world with the mind and not with the sensory organs.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal -

Belief is made up of the same non-substance of which we ourselves are composed. The test of any belief system, then, is the degree to which this same light is permitted to shine through.

Swami Dhyan Giten -

The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart - the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life.The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking.The first lev

Tyler Hamilton -

What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.

Zhuangzi - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.

Dalai Lama XIV - The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

The theory of emptiness…is the deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own existence in it, and the way things actually are.

Debasish Mridha -

Emptiness is not a great loss. It creates a great opportunity to fill yourself again and again with great love.

Debasish Mridha -

A busy life is filled with tremendous emptiness.

Anita Krizzan -

I've been living in the shadow of empty people for far too long. Now I need to find chests full of wild lilies, minds full of wonder, hearts full of light.

J.D. Stroube - Caged in Spirit

The melodious song mesmerized me and cloaked my soul in a most liberating embrace I had never known. The emotion enveloped me, and smothered the emptiness.

Swami Dhyan Giten -

Lao Tzu's first paragraph in the book "Tao Te Ching" is that the Tao that can be told is not the absolute Tao.Lao Tzu has his own logic, the logic of paradoxes, the logic of life.To understand Tao, you will have to create eyes.Lao Tzu believes in the unity of opposites, because that is how life is.The Tao can be communicated, but it can only be communicated from heart to heart, from being to being, from love to love, from silence to silence.Truth is always realized in silence. In silence, the tr

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Rainer Maria Rilke - New Poems

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -

A world without music is only filled with sounds in the air

Munia Khan -

What can we expect from an empty shell Where many hearts of pearl once beat to dwell Waves fail to break hard layer's bond of loveWailing shore sends memoir to the sky above

Frederick Barthelme - Elroy Nights

What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart.

Adelheid Manefeldt - Years: a book of tiny poetry

indelible waitingl'art poetique"..I will wait for the night to chase me..."I sit on a rock and watch children playingin the park belowThey don't see meOr know my thoughtsOr that you haven't calledBut I forgive them their indifference todayAbove me a crow cawsPerhaps he smells the crumbs on my dressOr my angerBut he flits away over the treesProbably has a homeProbably has a wifeProbably knew to callThe children leaveThe coffee in my can turns coldThe wind nips at meSome street lights flicker onBu

P.G. Wodehouse - Doctor Sally

Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails.

Virginia Woolf -

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Michal Ajvaz - The Golden Age

It is true that nothing here makes any sense, but this is no great misfortune; I learned from the islanders that sense is not of any particular importance, that its presence may even disrupt the clean lines of certain pictures and cast a cloud over their fine light, while laments on the absurdity of being struck me as self-indulgent and objectionable even before my stay on the island. Once you get a little used to a terrain cleansed of sense, you realize that there is amusement enough to be had

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

We try to find something to fill our void. But it is only God who can fill the void.

Dag Hammarskjöld - Markings

Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.

Marty Rubin -

There are 200,000 species of fly alone. So the void, the emptiness, must be in you.

Carl Sagan -

In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

Craig Groeschel - Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working

Rather than continuing on the normal sexual path toward pain, emptiness, and idolatry, you can allow God to heal you, change the way you think, and place deliberate safeguards in your life to protect you.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Coney Island of the Mind

[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Bhavya Kaushik - The Other Side of the Bed

I feel like, I was going somehow with my life, holding myself together and then these blasts happened, and then suddenly I was paralyzed. I was not able to move, or to even hold myself intact. As if like I was fallen into this unconscious state, of eternal sleep. When I was asleep, somebody came and disassembled me into thousands of pieces and then hurriedly put me back together in a second, losing some of my pieces on the ground, or placing some of them incorrectly – you know, that kind of feel

Anthon St. Maarten -

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

Jasmine Warga - My Heart and Other Black Holes

He knows what he'll find if he digs deeper. there's no rush to unpack my insides. he understands there is nothing special about emptiness, nothing interesting about depression.

David L. Conroy - Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain

Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. 'Snap out of it and get on with your life,' sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.

David L. Conroy - Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain

Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. "Snap out of it and get on with your life," sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.

Jonathan Franzen - Farther Away

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

Katherine Paterson - Lyddie

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

Shaun Hick -

A night of crying has silenced me. This morning it seems the whole world is against me. I've never before felt so barren, so empty. I've never before thought the daylight to be ... my enemy. My enemy.

W.G. Sebald -

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

P.G. Wodehouse - Doctor Sally

Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails.

Mary E. DeMuth - Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

When the world careens out of control, we can rest in the fact that God spun this world with a simple word. Matter from emptiness. Beauty from void. Community from chaos.

Munia Khan -

Being empty makes me whole sometimes. I wonder if every hollow hole has its own solidity of fulfillment

Allie Burke - Paper Souls

The universe requires balance. Nothing, nothing, can exist without it. There is no life, no light, without death, without darkness. There is no memory… without emptiness.

Tamara Thiel - Random Musings of a Curious Soul

I was barely breathing now, my head felt light. I stumbled to the nearest bench and I clasped my hands together, my fingers gripping each other painfully in an attempt to feel useful. Their job had been to hold fast and it had been so long since they had been empty. They had done their job well, they had clung to those memories even in the dead of night when I was fast asleep, remaining vigilant, keepers of my heart’s most inner desires. My icy hands with their narrow fingers had done my heart's

Kelly Moran - Exposure

I look at you and my heart pounds, when for years, I don't think it beat at all. You fill the cracks and crevices, take away the emptiness. And when you're not by my side, the loss is unimaginable.

Anne Lamott - Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.

Katherine McIntyre - Rising for Autumn

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.