Nothingness Quotes - Page 8

• I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

  Margaret Atwood

  Depression, Lying, Stupid

  Margaret Atwood (1988). “Cat's eye”, Doubleday, 1989

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• Zen has lost its zip, if you will, or its nothingness and has become ritualistic Its established in monastaries with strict codes of koan study.

  Frederick Lenz

  Zips, Study, Lost

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• I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.

  Wernher von Braun

  Believe, Science, Soul

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• One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

  Norman Mailer

  Weed, War, Marijuana

  Interview in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series" edited by George Plimpton, 1967.

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• The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Dance, Art

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• Everything is meant to be lost, that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness

  Meister Eckhart

  Grieving, Soul, May

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• Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

  Andre Maurois

  Death, Fear, Men

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• There is no such thing as reality. Reality is what you make it.

  Frederick Lenz

  Reality

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• Perhaps - and this goes for the Kyoto School too - one of these insights is that nothingness and unknowing don't have to be equated with a destructive nihilism but with the experience of unity and participation - whilst resisting the tendency of objectifying metaphysics to claim that we can in some way 'know' that this experienced unity is really the truth of how things are, i.e., reveals being itself.

  George Pattison

  School, Kyoto, Unity

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Atheist, Men, Goal

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.532, Modern Library

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• There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.

  Terence

  Life, Attitude, Positive Thinking

  "Heauton Timorumenos". Play by Terence, Act IV, scene 6, line 1 (805),

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• The whole art of allowing the truth to take possession of you is of being vulnerable, of being open, of being in a let-go. Or in other words, the whole art consists of one word, "surrender". And that's what sannyas is, that's my definition of a sannyasin: a man who is surrendered to existence so totally that he never thinks in terms of achievement any more, because he is no more. Who is there to achieve? - he has disappeared totally, he has not left even a trace behind. In that very moment, when you are just a pure nothingness, truth arrives. It is a gift of God.

  Rajneesh

  Letting Go, Art, Men

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• I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Change, Money

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• We label things through value systems that we have developed. But nothing is or is not unless we feel it is that way. We give ground to reality by creating it.

  Frederick Lenz

  Reality, Creating, Giving

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• That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

  Brian Greene

  Fall, Holy Grail, Tiny

  "Professor Brian Greene answers everything you wanted to know about string theory and the multiverse". www.abc.net.au. February 26, 2016.

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• So in the world of Enlightenment, things are just things, except they're not things. We're in nirvana. There is no debating team.

  Frederick Lenz

  Team, Enlightenment, World

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• Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

  Jean Cocteau

  What Matters, Past Present Future, Earth

  Jean Cocteau, Margaret Crosland (1972). “Cocteau's world: an anthology of writings”, Owen

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• Nirvana is something that cannot be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it is only incongruous from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness of division, of time and space

  Frederick Lenz

  Space, Perspective, Division

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• The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

  Guy Davenport

  Perception, World, Acres

  Guy Davenport (1997). “The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays”, p.192, David R. Godine Publisher

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• This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

  Neil Gaiman

  Reality, Void, Blackness

  Neil Gaiman (2013). “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”, p.137, Hachette UK

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• Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he's made of it. You tell me that I want God's love? I don't. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there's no-one to ask it of. And there's no going back, there's no setting things right, there's only the hope of nothingness.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Dawn, Want, Infinite

  "Fictional character: White". "The Sunset Limited", www.imdb.com. 2011.

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• There is no self. There is nobody home. No forwarding address, no zip code. Address unknown.

  Frederick Lenz

  Home, Self, Addresses

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  Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

  Victor Hugo

  Zero, Philosophy, Nihilism

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• Pretended to see nothing in the old woman's taunts. Very hard to imagine nothingness.

  Georg Ebers

  Imagine, Taunting, Old Woman

  Georg Ebers “The Historical Romances of Georg Ebers”, Library of Alexandria

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• All incarnations are lived at once, and yet there does seem to be a linear sense of time when you're in the vortex of time and space, when your consciousness is fixated in a body.

  Frederick Lenz

  Science, Space, Doe

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