Quotes about nothingness

Aldo Palazzeschi - Man of Smoke

Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination.

Alice Fulton -

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward whatlooks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.

Arthur Schopenhauer -

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

James Patterson - The Christmas Wedding

You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.

Marty Rubin -

Even the faded flower denies nothingness.

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Other Tales

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of a

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfecti

Thomas Ligotti -

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you

Álvaro de Campos -

and the idea of nothingness — the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master’s work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.

Italo Calvino - The Complete Cosmicomics

If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.

Philip Larkin -

Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

John Williams -

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had l

kambiz shabankareh -

Anyone who has read enough, explored enough and experienced enough, somewhere in his/ her life will realize that the life is repeating itself again and again and again. He/she will soon understand there is nothing new to discover, all quests of human life have been experience and discovered in the past and all we do to play the game over and over to gain a different result, like an idiot who watches movie several time and hope to see a different ending. In such age, people no to remain enthusias

Sherwood Anderson - Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of him

Fernando Pessoa -

I am nothing.I'll never be anything.I couldn't want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Akshay Vasu -

Tell me about those days, when you stood on a thin line between dreams and reality, watching it get disappear slowly. All of a sudden there is no difference between both. And you get tore apart into nothingness. Where your mind always asked you to be awake, scared of being haunted by dreams and your heart asked you always to fall asleep, to escape from the hands of reality, because it haunted you too.

Emil M. Cioran -

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Sarah Keddar -

Sometimes, I feel able to write lines about my life and about how I do feel everyday in such a huge book, but sometimes I either prefer to write one word that describe it or just to say nothing at all.

Charles Lee -

I preach darkness. I don't inspire hope—only shadows. It's up to you to find the light in my words.

Tom Robbins - Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Meditation,” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ‘cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the univer

Dejan Stojanovic -

Absolute equals nothingness.

Haruki Murakami - After Dark

Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”“Basically.”“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I c

Rebecca James - Beautiful Malice

There is nothing for you in this bleak hospital room but a cold and empty nothingness that has no answers, can give no peace, will provide no comfort to the living.

Giovanni Papini -

Life to be bearable must be lived intensely. Through it a continuous stream of emotion passes. Though that emotion is ever changing as flowing water changes, it at least bears us along on a current that gives the illusion of continuity and permanence. But analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul.

Allie Brosh - and Other Things That Happened

There I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.

Phindiwe Nkosi - Behind the Hospital

This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.

Álvaro de Campos -

Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

Anthony Liccione -

Go to God with your coal, and He will set them to blazing fire.

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.

Umera Ahmed -

What is next to ecstasy?Pain.What is next to pain?Nothingness.What is next to nothingness?Hell.

Akshay Vasu -

It hurts, doesn't it? Giving someone everything you can think of. The wings to fly and roots to stay and yet watch them choose none of those, leaving you hanging in the middle of void and nothingness.

Aditya Ajmera -

Don't ever underestimate the value and power of doing nothing sometime.

Osho - Zen: The Path of Paradox

Zen is a single step—the journey of one single step. You can call it the last step or the first step, it doesn’t matter. It is the first and it is the last, the alpha and the omega. The whole teaching of Zen consists of only one thing: how to take a jump into nothingness, how to come to the very end of your mind, which is the end of the world.

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" )

Thomm Quackenbush - Flies to Wanton Boys

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, out of the nothing came the Word and the Word was power. Every utterance of the Word gave form to the Void, starting with beings to utter the Word. There was no Adam, no Eve, and no need. What Man named was.

Tadeusz Konwicki -

-I haven't been writing for years. I lost faith. it's not for me. Too many levels.-What levels?-All those levels of existence. us down here, and up there, high above us. the ceiling of the universe. I've chosen nothingness.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

Kamran Pasha - Mother of the Believers

If I have learned one thing in the years of my existence, one nugget of wisdom from having lived in the midst of disputations over faith and the nature of the world, it is that everything ends. This is both the blessing and the punishment of God upon the foolish tribe that calls itself man. We can embrace the end or we can weep, but the ghost of time closes all doors with a finality that can never be gainsaid.

Aditya Ajmera -

The wise man is one who knows, the significance and nothingness of his life.

Roshan Sharma -

More and more you empty your mind, more and more you come closer to the spirit in the body.

Marty Rubin -

Home is where you can go and rest and be nothing

William Golding - The Spire

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that itexists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest isconstruction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothingbut water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thoselikewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, t

John C. Lilly - The Center of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space

I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the g

Stefan Zweig -

Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death

Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face.Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer.He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void."Tony?" she

Etienne de L'Amour -

Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?Existence didn't just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of possibility; a possibility that something -- anything -- such as the imaginal, might exist.Why are we here at all? Because this was a possibility, and we are the living proof that there must have been such a possibility. So, you might say that existence, in one form or another, was even more

Martijn Budel -

Nihilists embrace life's existence by the acceptance of nothingness

Jasper Fforde - The Woman Who Died a Lot

All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause.

Octavio Paz - The Monkey Grammarian

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not

Gore Vidal - The City and the Pillar

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

RJ Blizzard -

Edward, maybe you're seeking the wrong answer? You are asking the wrong question. It's not what you believe, but how you choose to believe. Everyone believes something. Even nothing is something.

Beth Revis - As They Slip Away

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing.And nothing can be nice.

Drew Magary - The Postmortal

I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.

Munia Khan -

Seventy years of life is nothing in front of a single day of death

Fernando Pessoa - Poems of Fernando Pessoa

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

Toba Beta - My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

Perfection's stuck.

Charles Bukowski -

So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

Czesław Miłosz - A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

Andrea Gibson -

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.Tell me why you loved them,then tell me why they loved you. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling good.I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling bad.I wanna know the first person who taught you your beautycould ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass.See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living.I wanna know how much of your life you spend ju

Emil M. Cioran - On the Heights of Despair

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

Deb Caletti - He's Gone

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding--something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing.

Jay Woodman -

Breath (from the book Blue Bridge)Whispering to myself With every step I take,Trying out names, for I know There is something yet to be called …..I know it, something up ahead Just around the bendOr over the rise – A bird taking to the skyFrom the edge of a jagged cliff – A bird floating outwardsIn silence ……. A silence Waiting for a footstepTo crunch on stones, For a voice to fling upwardThrough sharp sunlight With a name…… callingBefore the bird could call Before the bird called.Oh the bird wa

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

A person’s industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind’s greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness.

Charles M. Blow - Fire Shut Up in My Bones

I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.

Maggie Nelson -

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Tahereh Mafi - Unravel Me

It's strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.

Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...

Edie brickell -

There's nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing could cause a great big fight.

Marty Rubin -

Nothing can come of nothing. There is no room in my world for nothing.

Patti Smith - M Train

-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

Ben King -

Nothing to do but work Nothing to eat but food Nothing to wear but clothes To keep one from going nude.

Alexander Pope -

Blessed be he who expects nothing for he shall never be disappointed.

Seneca -

They laboriously do nothing.

Lord Alfred Tennyson -

A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

John K. Brown -

The type of nothing from which something can arise is truly something.

Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.

John K. Brown -

All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

You will either have value, or be grist for the mill — nothing more.

Robert A.F. Thurman - The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

No sane person fears nothingness.

Robert A.F. Thurman - The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

Alan W. Watts -

If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that – at a time not too distant – each one of us will simply cease to be. It won’t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all

Raheel Farooq -

Love is not an idea, not a feeling, not a sensation, not a sentiment, not a passion, not even an emotion. It is becoming and being not... Ultimate nothingness! Complete self-annihilation!

Antonio Machado - Times Alone: Selected Poems

When the I AM THAT I AM made nothingAnd rested, which rest it certainly deserved,Night now accompanied day, and manHad his friend in the absence of the woman.

Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl

But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.

Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).

Denton Welch - A Voice Through a Cloud

I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.

Virginia Woolf - The Waves

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Sol Luckman - Beginner's Luke

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

Nothing on earth is as unbearable as dealing with other people if you are a person who lacks compassion and understanding.

Erich Fromm -

Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.

William Golding - Darkness Visible

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

William Barrett - Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.

Kathleen Dowling Singh - The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

Like the medieval cartographers of Europe, who felt one would fall into endless space at the edges of the oceans of their maps, we fear the presumed nothingness of no-self. Fortunately, there have been many spiritual circumnavigators who have returned to tell the tale of the beauty beyond self.

Santosh Kalwar -

Dance your pain, sing your sorrows, because there is nothing else tomorrow.

The Beatles - Vocal Score

He's a real nowhere man,Sitting in his Nowhere Land,Making all his nowhere plansfor nobody.Doesn't have a point of view,Knows not where he's going to,Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.