Nothingness Quotes

The type of nothing from which something can arise is truly something.

John K. Brown

Nothing to do but work Nothing to eat but food Nothing to wear but clothes To keep one from going nude.

Ben King

Blessed be he who expects nothing for he shall never be disappointed.

Alexander Pope

They laboriously do nothing.

Seneca

A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Nothing to do but work Nothing to eat but food Nothing to wear but clothes To keep one from going nude.

Ben King

Blessed be he who expects nothing for he shall never be disappointed.

Alexander Pope

They laboriously do nothing.

Seneca

A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...

Neil Gaiman

-What is nothing? I impetuously asked.-It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

Patti Smith

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Maggie Nelson

It's strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.

Tahereh Mafi

There's nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing could cause a great big fight.

Edie brickell

Nothing can come of nothing. There is no room in my world for nothing.

Marty Rubin

Life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero.

Hanya Yanagihara

All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.

John K. Brown

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

Czesław Miłosz

So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

Charles Bukowski

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.Tell me why you loved them,then tell me why they loved you. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling good.I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirroron a day you’re feeling bad.I wanna know the first person who taught you your beautycould ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass.See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living.I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving,and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes.I wanna know if you bleed sometimesfrom other people’s wounds,and if you dream sometimesthat this life is just a balloon —that if you wanted to, you could pop,but you never would‘cause you’d never want it to stop.If a tree fell in the forestand you were the only one there to hear —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

I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.

Charles M. Blow

There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.

Bryant McGill

Breath (from the book Blue Bridge)Whispering to myselftWith every step I take,Trying out names, for I knowtThere is something yet to be called …..I know it, something up aheadtJust around the bendOr over the rise –tA bird taking to the skyFrom the edge of a jagged cliff – A bird floating outwardsIn silence ……. A silencetWaiting for a footstepTo crunch on stones,tFor a voice to fling upwardThrough sharp sunlighttWith a name…… callingBefore the bird could calltBefore the bird called.Oh the bird was there alrighttAnd sure it took flightWhen it heard me approachtBut it broke my heartWith a mighty croak!So I’m sitting here playingtWith a purple flowerSlender stem, no leavestPurple fizz –And it’s quiet again.tI am stillI am nothingtAnd the hillIs a long, long slopetDown, down, down to the seaFar below.I could rolltI could runI could screamtBut I am nothing.A cool wind blowstAnd the light is naked and namelessAnd the rocks are faces of angelstAnd the bird in the sky wheelsAnd cries to forget the earthtAnd its ancient bones –Oh, sensual pain –tWings…. Wings…. Wings,Singing wings.If only I could begin To describe the emptinessWhich fills me to the brimtWith new breathI might almost lose my nametAnd take instead a feather for my soul.

Jay Woodman

Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August.I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of.Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'.Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means.So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of h

Jake Wood

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

Emil M. Cioran

It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment in your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding--something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there's something you need to be doing.

Deb Caletti

Edward, maybe you're seeking the wrong answer? You are asking the wrong question. It's not what you believe, but how you choose to believe. Everyone believes something. Even nothing is something.

RJ Blizzard

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing.And nothing can be nice.

Beth Revis

A person’s industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind’s greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.

Drew Magary

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

Fernando Pessoa

Perfection's stuck.

Toba Beta

Seventy years of life is nothing in front of a single day of death

Munia Khan

I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.

Denton Welch

Love is not an idea, not a feeling, not a sensation, not a sentiment, not a passion, not even an emotion. It is becoming and being not... Ultimate nothingness! Complete self-annihilation!

Raheel Farooq

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

It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).

Marie Darrieussecq

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Virginia Woolf

But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.

Rainbow Rowell

When the I AM THAT I AM made nothingAnd rested, which rest it certainly deserved,Night now accompanied day, and manHad his friend in the absence of the woman.

Antonio Machado

No sane person fears nothingness.

Robert A.F. Thurman

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

Robert A.F. Thurman

If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that – at a time not too distant – each one of us will simply cease to be. It won’t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won’t be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist – and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can’t form the slight idea of it is that it’s yourself. But not the self you thought you were.

Alan W. Watts

You will either have value, or be grist for the mill — nothing more.

Bryant McGill

All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause.

Jasper Fforde

Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?Existence didn't just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of possibility; a possibility that something -- anything -- such as the imaginal, might exist.Why are we here at all? Because this was a possibility, and we are the living proof that there must have been such a possibility. So, you might say that existence, in one form or another, was even more than more likely, it was inevitable.

Etienne de L'Amour

Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

Stefan Zweig

Let me sleep," he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror - this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man's door in her face.Instantly, she raised her hand to knock, discovered the rock... she banged on the door with the rock, but not loudly, just enough to let him know how desperate she was to get back in, but not enough to bother him if he didn't want to answer.He didn't. No sound, no movement of the door. Nothing but the void."Tony?" she gasped, pressing her ear to the door. Silence. "Okay," she said numbly; clutching her rock she walked unsteadily across the porch toward her own living quarters.The rock vanished. Her hand felt nothing."Damn," she said, not knowing how to react. Where had it gone? Into air. But then it must have been an illusion, she realized. He put me in a hypnotic state and made me believe. I should have known it wasn't really true.A million stars burst into wheels of light, blistering, cold light, that drenched her. It came from behind and she felt the great weight of it crash into her. "Tony," she said, and fell into the waiting void. She thought nothing; she felt nothing. She saw only, saw the void as it absorbed her, waiting below and beneath her as she plummeted down the many miles.On her hands and knees she died. Alone on the porch. Still clutching for what did not exist.

Philip K Dick

I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping".I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In this body I look back up, see the choice-tree above me that I came down.Did I, this Essence, come all the way down to this solar system, this planet, this place, this body, or does it make any difference? May not this body be a vehicle for any Essence that came into it? Are not all Essences universal, equal, anonymous, and equally able? Instructions for this vehicle are in it for each Essence to read and absorb on entry. The new pilot-navigator reads his instructions in storage and takes over, competently operating this vehicle.

John C. Lilly

Nihilists embrace life's existence by the acceptance of nothingness

Martijn Budel

The wise man is one who knows, the significance and nothingness of his life.

Aditya Ajmera

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

William Golding

More and more you empty your mind, more and more you come closer to the spirit in the body.

Roshan Sharma

Home is where you can go and rest and be nothing

Marty Rubin

If I have learned one thing in the years of my existence, one nugget of wisdom from having lived in the midst of disputations over faith and the nature of the world, it is that everything ends. This is both the blessing and the punishment of God upon the foolish tribe that calls itself man. We can embrace the end or we can weep, but the ghost of time closes all doors with a finality that can never be gainsaid.

Kamran Pasha

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.

Gore Vidal

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness.

Octavio Paz

Stephen Hawking asks, 'what did God do before he created the Universe?' Answer: He created Nothing

Atom Tate

How small life is hereand how big nothingness.The sky, tired of light,has given everything to the snow.The two trees bowtheir heads to each other.Clouds cross the world’ssilence in a circle dance

Robert Walser

Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.

Ira N. Barin

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Nothingness Quotes

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