Nothingness Quotes - Page 16

• Jesus.. says, 'Let go of your complaints, forgive those who loved you poorly, step over your feelings of being rejected, and have the courage to trust that you won't fall into an abyss of nothingness but into the safe embrace of a God whose love will heal all your wounds.

  Henri Nouwen

  Letting Go, Jesus, Fall

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• A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

  Fred Allen

  Inspirational, Funny, Teamwork

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• What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

  Alan Watts

  Ocean, Future, Zest

  "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are". Book by Alan Watts, 1966.

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• Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.

  Roger Zelazny

  Dream, Sleep, Men

  Roger Zelazny (2001). “Isle of the Dead ; Eye of Cat”, Ibooks

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• But you need to have lived years in nothingness to understand how a person can suddenly become frightened by a possibility.

  David Foenkinos

  Years, Needs, Possibility

  David Foenkinos (2011). “Delicacy”, p.140, A&C Black

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• If a tree fell in the forest, and you were the only one there to hear it; if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?

  Andrea Gibson

  Fall, Tree, Sound

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• My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Chaos, Amazement

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• Pot put me in a position where I could walk far away from my playing and hear it in the second person. It helped me step away from myself. I stopped seeing the guitar as a thing I'm holding in my hands and started seeing it as a thing that's at one with outer space and nothingness.

  John Frusciante

  Space, Guitar, Hands

  High Times Magazine, July 1995.

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• 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.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Running, Stars, Fall

  Mohsin Hamid (2000). “Moth Smoke”, p.87, Penguin Books India

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• When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

  John Keats

  Book, Night, Thinking

  'When I have fears that I may cease to be' (written 1818)

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• What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Arthur Rimbaud (1957). “Illuminations, and Other Prose Poems”, p.29, New Directions Publishing

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• Nothing is more dreadful in life than the profound thought that death may only greet you with eternal nothingness.

  Elizabeth Kim

  Profound, May, Eternal

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• A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  People, Belief, Solace

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• Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

  William Barrett

  Anxiety, Feelings, Uncanny

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• How could I tell the doctor what was wrong with me? I didn't understand it myself. I couldn't articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness. My fear was of the weather, the atmosphere, the very air. What good did safety tips do me now? 'Avoid water, metal objects, rooftops; stay off the telephone in a storm, don't think glass can protect you; even if a storm was 8 miles away, you're still not safe from a strike. Avoid life perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip, stay away from it all.

  Alice Hoffman

  Pain, Fear, Thinking

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• Living under capitalism, I like learning to feel comfortable with activity that does not result in success — since non-success is the norm. Trying your best and making it is not the norm — it’s propaganda. Of course I play with notions of hype, too... The entire Comatonse website is a sarcastic hype-engine, sprawling forever, overwhelming the viewer with nothingness.

  Terre Thaemlitz

  Sarcastic, Play, Hype

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• Sometimes you say to yourself: the fire in me is going out. But you were not the one who lit that fire. Your faith does not create God, and your doubts cannot banish Him to nothingness.

  Brother Roger

  Fire, Doubt, Doe

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• A dangerous fallacy is to repudiate freedom in favor of an unknown future. What else but our own sturdy reliance on freedom can explain the unexampled record this country has made? In a period scarcely twice my own lifetime it has risen from nothingness to become the world's greatest power. It has become the ark of the covenant of freedom.

  Bernard Baruch

  Country, Future, Ark

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• I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.

  Michael Gira

  Philosophy, Reading, School

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• Our great whirling planet, our human individuality, were not given to us merely that we might exist for a time and then vanish into nothingness, but that we might question what it is all about.
  To live without understanding the purpose of life is foolish, a waste of time. The mystery of life surrounds us; we were given intelligence in order to solve it.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Order, Understanding, Individuality

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• Expression is when you are at one with nothingness.

  John Frusciante

  Expression

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• Devotion is a tool to dissolve yourself into nothingness and become the very hand of the Divine.

  Jaggi Vasudev

  Spiritual, Hands, Tools

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• What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am.

  Thomas Merton

  Mistake, Mean, Humility

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.49, Macmillan

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• The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

  Lew Wallace

  Inscriptions, Protest, After Death

  Lew Wallace (2016). “Historical Novels of Lew Wallace: Ben-Hur, The Fair God & The Prince of India (Illustrated): A Tale of the Christ, The Last of the 'Tzins – Story of Aztecs and Conquistadors & The Fall of Constantinople”, p.454, e-artnow

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• That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God's chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Love, Taken, Eye

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