Emptiness Quotes - Page 12

• There is something more important than the place being left. It's that swell of crushing emptiness that makes the insignificant seem anything but.

  Lucas Mann

  Crush, Important, Insignificant

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations.

  Jamgon Kongtrul

  Purity, Concepts

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• Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.

  Pema Chodron

  Buddhist, Pain, Heart

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• Everyone in the Lotus Eaters is so concerned with appearances, but there's an emptiness under the surface that they're trying to ignore. We talked about the theme of perception versus reality a lot with mirrors and masks what people were wearing - and we shot on two formats; we shot it on film and on digital, and a lot of the night-time scenes are film, and it looks better, and people can put on a mask and they can go out there and show an artifice to the world.

  Alexandra McGuinness

  Reality, People, Perception

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?

  Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

  Memories, Past, Trying

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• Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars.

  Robert Beer

  Stars, Spring, Work

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• Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

  Ted Nelson

  People, Pretending

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• In some ways, Lotus Eaters is a journey disguised as a party film; there's a circus in the movie, and there are parties, but the real story is of an internal journey. There's themes of emptiness and excess and beauty and grief around it, but it's always surrounded by these glamorous events, and those are ways of waylaying her on her journey in the same way that it is in the ancient Greek story.

  Alexandra McGuinness

  Real, Party, Grief

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

  T. S. Eliot

  Voice, Singing, Exhausted

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.697, Faber & Faber

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• A vessel is formed from a lump of clay with care, however, it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.

  Laozi

  Space, Clay, Care

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• When you're trying to create something and you need to hang out, in not knowing, in all the cracks and spaces where you feel lost, and you need to endure them, and have new ideas come out of that emptiness, well, the Internet is what we do when we feel lost, you know? Like, you go online or you check your email when you don't know what to do next, and so it's not helpful, in that sense.

  Miranda July

  Ideas, Knowing, Space

  Source: thequietus.com

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• When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Talking, Europe, East

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Lying, Play, Voice

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• The word "emptiness" for example, is a very important word both in Christianity and in Buddhism. It has shades of meaning however, that are different in the respective traditions.

  Thomas Keating

  Buddhism, Important, Different

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere

  W. S. Merwin

  Hands

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• The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Pain, Disappointment, Hard Work

  Eugene H. Peterson (2012). “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society”, p.100, InterVarsity Press

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• We've fallen for the devil's lie. His most basic strategy, the same one he employed with Adam and Eve, is to make us believe that sin brings fulfillment. However, in reality, sin robs us of fulfillment. Sin doesn't make life interesting; it makes life empty. Sin doesn't create adventure; it blunts it. Sin doesn't expand life; it shrinks it. Sin's emptiness inevitably leads to boredom. When there's fulfillment, when there's beauty, when we see God as he truly is-an endless reservoir of fascination-boredom becomes impossible.

  Randy Alcorn

  Lying, Believe, Adventure

  Randy Alcorn (2011). “Heaven”, p.394, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• When the soul is starved for nourishment, it lets us know with feelings of emptiness, anxiety, or yearning

  Menachem Mendel Schneerson

  Anxiety, Soul, Feelings

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• People are beginning to realize that self-knowledge is not an end in itself. It's for the purpose of better relationships, so that we can give to our community. You can give from overflow. It's very hard to give from emptiness. . . . People who avoid self-knowledge cause a great deal of pain to themselves as well as to their families and friends.

  Jennifer James

  Pain, Self, People

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• Guilt is the sum total of: All the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves! Any form of self-hatred, self-rejection, feelings of worthlessness, sinfulness, inferiority, incompetence, failure, or emptiness. The feeling that there are things in us that are lacking or missing or incomplete.

  Kenneth Wapnick

  Self, Hatred, Missing

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• I am ashamed of my emptiness," said the Word to the Work. "I know how poor I am when I see you," said the Work to the Word.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Poor, Said, Ashamed

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Poems”, p.412, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• You prep, you prep, you prep. And on the day that you film, you let all of that go. I try to achieve emptiness as much as possible - the Zen thing - to let the deal come out of that nothing.

  Jeff Bridges

  Trying, Film, Achieve

  "THR Cover: Jeff Bridges' Revealing New Interview" by Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 12, 2011.

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• The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

  Wallace Stevens

  Winter, Ice, Sky

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.319, Vintage

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• The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. . . . When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Moon, Night, Sky

  D. H. Lawrence (1966). “Selected Poems of D.h. Lawrence”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Space is an environment of emptiness. It offers no possibility for natural adaptation to any living organism - and particularly not to the highly sophisticated creature, man. Yet man has the ability to resolve this paradox through his intellectual power and creative faculties.

  Hubertus Strughold

  Men, Medicine, Space

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