Nothingness Quotes - Page 15

• Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Doe, Want, Existence

  Simone de Beauvoir (1948). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”

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• There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Religious, Sacrifice, Fate

  "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche, Chapter III, Aphorism 55, 1886.

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• Believing nothing does whilst there remained anything else to be done.

  Lucan

  Believe, Doe, Done

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• None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.

  Frederick Lenz

  Real, Ignorance, Shadow

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• How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Death, Memories, Bitter

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.184, Pan Macmillan

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• I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

  Maurice Blanchot

  Mirrors, Light, Offering

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• Hello Kitty is an icon that doesn't stand for anything at all. Hello Kitty never has been, and never will be, anything. She's pure license; you can even get a Hello Kitty car! The branding thing is completely out of control, but it started as nothing and maintains its nothingness. It's not about the ego, and in that way it's very Japanese.

  Tom Sachs

  Icons, Car, Ego

  "Ichiban". www.wired.com. September 01, 2001.

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• Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

  Donna Tartt

  Action, Fullness

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.278, Vintage

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• How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance

  Robert Walser

  Tired, Clouds, Light

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• We are made up of nothing. There is no self. We are whatever we decide we are.

  Frederick Lenz

  Self, Made

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• We aren't anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind.

  Frederick Lenz

  Self, Ideas, Mind

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• It is said that peace is the basic tenet of all religion. Yet it is in the name of religion that there has been so much disturbance, bloodshed and persecution. It is indeed a pity that even at the close of the twentieth century we've had to witness such atrocities because of religion. Flying the flag of religion has always proved the easiest way to crush to nothingness human beings as well as the spirit of humanity.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Crush, Names, Flying

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• You're a part of me. I'm a part of you and we are all a part of this great nothingness.

  Frederick Lenz

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• In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.

  Alan Lightman

  Lying, Loneliness, Future

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• If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

  Max Born

  Philosophy, Law, Numbers

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• We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness.

  Omar Khayyam

  Chess, Boards, Pieces

  Omar Khayyam (1898). “Quatrains of Omar Khayyam: In English Prose”

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• It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, now I realize what we all are . If only they [people] could all see themselves as they really are I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusions, a point of pure truth This little point is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody.

  Thomas Merton

  Fall, Destiny, Race

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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, Emptiness, Infinite

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• The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.

  Michel Onfray

  Mother, Atheist, Book

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• I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I'm breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed in my life.

  Lauren Oliver

  Dream, Stars, Thinking

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• I hate you!” I screamed at Fang. Tucking my wings in, I aimed downward, diving toward the ground at more than two hundred miles an hour. “No you dooonnn’t!” Fang’s voice spiraled away into nothingness, far above me. Inside my head, almost drowned out by the roar of wind rushing by my ears, I heard the Voice make a tsking sound. You guys are crazy about each other, it said.

  James Patterson

  Crazy, Hate, Wind

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• As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Cutting, Men, Creative

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1965). “The Knowledge of the Holy”, p.32, Fig

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• We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!

  Samuel Beckett

  Hands, Bored, Waiting

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett”, p.72, Faber & Faber

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• All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. 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 be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Grief, Self

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.194, Profile Books

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• Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

  Joan Didion

  Wall, Night, Blue

  Joan Didion (2012). “Blue Nights (Enhanced Edition)”, p.134, Knopf

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