Emptiness Quotes - Page 30

• By affliction He teaches us many precious lessons, which without it we should never learn. By affliction He shows us our emptiness and weakness, draws us to the throne of grace, purifies our affections, weans us from the world, makes us long for heaven.

  J. C. Ryle

  Long, Heaven, Grace

  "Bible Commentary - The Gospel of Mark".

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• Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Medicine, Stronger, Truthful

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• You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection.

  Ken Wilber

  Reflection, Mirrors, Mind

  "Stages of Meditation". www.patheos.com. June 9, 2014.

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• I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

  Haruki Murakami

  Numbness, Together Again, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Sep 16, 2014

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• Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Facts, Infinite, Possibility

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• One hope no sooner dies in us but another rises up in its stead. We are apt to fancy that we shall be happy and satisfied if we possess ourselves of such and such particular enjoyments; but either by reason of their emptiness, or the natural inquietude of the mind, we have no sooner gained one point, but we extend our hopes to another. We still find new inviting scenes and landscapes lying behind those which at a distance terminated our view.

  Joseph Addison

  Hope, Distance, Lying

  Joseph Addison, Richard Hurd (1811). “The Works: In Six Volumes”, p.67

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• I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists.

  Paulo Coelho

  Book, Hard Work, Son

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• What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

  Jack Kerouac

  Stars, Mean, Men

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.145, Penguin

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• How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

  Eric Hoffer

  Death, Dying, World

  "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely". The New York Times Magazine, p. 62, April 25, 1971.

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• As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Lonely, Ego, Dawn

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• There is an emptiness inside of me -- a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother's love. And I will never be loved that way again.

  Hope Edelman

  Mother, Strong, Love You

  Hope Edelman (2014). “Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, 20th Anniversary Edition”, p.11, Da Capo Press

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• You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

  Anne Lamott

  Running, Writing, Filling Up

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• He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Heart, Able, Void

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• Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fan­tasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.

  Alice Miller

  Home, Vitality, Fans

  Alice Miller (1997). “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self”, p.19, Basic Books

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• I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

  Anne Lamott

  Father, Real, Light

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• There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.

  Stephen Fry

  Depression, Wall, Black

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• Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

  Frederick Buechner

  Believe, Missing Him, Voice

  Frederick Buechner (2009). “Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Depression, Strong, Lying

  Banana Yoshimoto, Michael Emmerich (2002). “Goodbye Tsugumi”, p.163, Grove Press

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• The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness.

  Adyashanti

  Love, Spiritual, Truth

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• Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

  Simone Weil

  Inspirational, Uplifting, Space

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.10, Psychology Press

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• I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.

  Ayn Rand

  Regret, Moments, Fountainhead

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.524, Penguin

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• Greedhas no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.

  Erich Fromm

  Loneliness, Boredom, Greed

  Erich Fromm (2013). “To Have Or To Be?”, p.97, A&C Black

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• Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.

  Louise Erdrich

  Dog, People, Mad

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• There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Pain, Firsts, Sound

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• I could see that everything I had identified as really me, was not really me, but was just a pattern of strategies to avoid some kind of abyss or emptiness.

  Gangaji

  Patterns, Kind, Awareness

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