Nothingness Quotes - Page 5

• We were green: we ripened and grew golden. The Sea terrified us: we learned how to drown. Squat and earthbound, we unfolded huge wings. We started sober: are love's startled drunkards. You hide me in your cloak of nothingness Reflect my ghost in your glass of being I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream Where your eternity briefly trembles.

  Rumi

  Dream, Glasses, Sea

  5 Copy quote

• In the end, oh I know,
  never, in my haggard passion,
  have I ever been such a cadaver as now
  as I take again in hand my tables of the present—
  if reality's real, but after it's been
  destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
  the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Real, Passion, Hands

  Pier Paolo Pasolini, Norman MacAfee, Luciano Martinengo (1982). “Poems”, New York : Random House

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you've won the lottery.

  Susan Orlean

  Ordinary Days, Like You, Feels

  "Snow Day" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. January 12, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

  Victor Hugo

  Zero, Philosophy, Men

  104 Copy quote

• What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

  Emile M. Cioran

  Abuse, Philosopher, Pity

  4 Copy quote

• Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Running, Clever, Unique

  Stanislaw Lem (2002). “The Cyberiad”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

  Thomas Merton

  Men, Opposites, Proud

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.50, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Blessing, Wind, Boredom

  Soren Kierkegaard (2004). “Either/Or: A Fragment of Life”, p.195, Penguin UK

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

  Blaise Pascal

  Passion, Heart, Sadness

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "Form is emptiness." That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, "Emptiness is form." One should not think that these are two seperate things.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo

  Thinking, Two, Phrases

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo, William Scott Wilson (2002). “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai”, p.70, Kodansha International

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thinking, Reflection, Imagination

  Blaise Pascal (1829). “Thoughts on Religion and Other Subjects”, p.76

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Sleep, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Space, Weight, Sturdy

  5 Copy quote

• 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 any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

  Thomas Mann

  Lying, Artist, Simple

  "Death in Venice". Book by Thomas Mann, translated by David Luke. Chapter 3, 1912.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

  Michel Foucault

  Dream, Twilight, Law

  "Madness and Civilization". Book by Michel Foucault, trans. by R. Howard, 1988.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today is the first day of the rest of your short, brutish existence as a sentient creature before being snuffed out into utter nothingness for all eternity.

  Matt Groening

  Struggle, Today, Firsts

  6 Copy quote

• Existence itself stands in need of nothing, for it lacks nothing, whereas everything else needs it, because outside of it there is nothing. Nothingness stands in need of existence, as a sick man lacks health and is in need. Health has no need of a sick man. To want nothing, therefore, characterizes the highest perfection, is fullest and purest existence.

  Meister Eckhart

  Men, Sick, Perfection

  22 Copy quote

• That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

  Alan Lightman

  Determination, Achievement, Age

  "Reunion". Book by Alan Lightman, www.nytimes.com. 2003.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Evil, Energy, Lasts

  "To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (If Only This Could Be Said)". Book edited and translated by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine, 2001.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Labor, Humans

  Alexis De Tocqueville (2004). “Democracy in America: The Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II”, p.48, Bantam Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Character, Being Positive, Atheism

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1820, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.

  Martin Heidegger

  Decay, World, Path

  Martin Heidegger (1987). “Nietzsche”

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Depression is about anger, it's about anxiety, it's about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakingly created for themselves. It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behavior of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos.

  Tim Lott

  Depression, Character, Unique

  53 Copy quote

• It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Wall, Eye, Dark

  4 Copy quote