Nothing Becomes Something Quotes & Sayings

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. — Oscar Wilde

When someone becomes transparent, then something shines through that person that has nothing to do with the person or any of his or her personal history. What is required is becoming so transparent that the self or ego dissolves. — Eckhart Tolle

When we are able to systematise and theologise God down to a set of absolute theological principles, I believe that we lose something essential. When our faith becomes nothing more than a stagnant creed or unchanging statement of belief, we lose sight of the majesty and glory of God, the mystery and diversity that gives vibrancy to our faith. — Brandan Roberston

We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

If you're feeling alone, and your weariness has grown, look up above, and thank God for His love. There's nothing you can do, to change His love for you; hold on friend, it's not the end. Something beautiful will come, the clouds will part for the sun, the skies will break for the Son, and the Father will say 'Well done.' But until then, until then, you're not alone. He can make bread from stone. Hold on to Him, and He'll hold on to you. Take one day at a time, pray for faith and be kind, and when forgetful becomes your mind, remember what He said, 'You are mine.' — Nick Vujicic

But men in their role of taxpayers will be subsidizing themselves in their role of consumers. It becomes a little difficult to trace in this maze precisely who is subsidizing whom. What is forgotten is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing. — Henry Hazlitt

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined. — Robert Musil

I think the spirit survives when we die, and nothing is wasted in nature and just as our material body disintegrates and becomes something else in the soil. The spirit becomes something else, reunites with a spiritual force that is out there in the universe. Not as individuals but as part of this spirituality. — Isabel Allende

My mother taught me this trick: if you repeat something over and over again it loses its meaning, for example homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework homework, see? Nothing. Our existence she said is the same way. You watch the sunset too often it just becomes 6 pm you make the same mistake over and over you stop calling it a mistake. If you just wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up one day you'll forget why. — Phil Kaye

The homeland, the myth of the homeland, becomes a fundamental value for those who have nothing else( ... )In a world where power, like wealth, falls to the few, where no merit guarantees a reward and justice becomes a commodity like anything else, the human heart needs fortification. It needs something permanent, something available to everyone, irrespective of their merits, of the political climate, of prestige, authority, or affluence. It may be that for the disinherited, this final place is their place of birth. A law that says we are all born equal is as beautiful as it is impossible to enact. But the fact that we are all born in a particular place is hard to question. For many of us, if not the majority, this is the only incontrovertible foundation of our fate. — Andrzej Stasiuk

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. — Theodore Roosevelt

The sensation - it's not sorrow, but something deeper - of being broken. Of being crushed so often, and so hatefully, that emotion becomes something you can only wish for. If only you could cry, because then you'd feel something. Instead, you feel nothing. Just ... haze and smoke inside. Like you're already dead. — Brandon Sanderson

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life's difficulties. — Thomas M. Sterner

There's something about that tunnel that leads to downtown. It's glorious at night. Just glorious. You start on one side of the mountain, and it's dark, and the radio is loud. As you enter the tunnel, the wind gets sucked away, and you squint from the lights overhead. When you adjust to the lights, you can see the other side in the distance just as the sound of the radio fades to nothing because the waves just can't reach. Then, you're in the middle of the tunnel, and everything becomes a calm dream. As you see the opening get closer, you just can't get there fast enough. And finally, just when you think you'll never get there, you see the opening right in front of you. And the radio comes back even louder than you remember it. And the wind is waiting. And you fly out of the tunnel onto the bridge. And there it is. The city. A million lights and buildings and everything seems as exciting as the first time you saw it. It really is a grand entrance. — Stephen Chbosky

Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."
Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.
But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."
He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.
True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."
You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

There is nothing more marvelous than doing something you love to do and getting paid for it. It ceases to become work, money, and effort; and it becomes fun, your expression of the joy of life. — Stuart Wilde

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that. — Oscar Wilde

Because . . . Nothing worthwhile in life is free," Balint said. "When it costs something, that item becomes much dearer. Yes, the Word could have saved all of mankind by just His words, but instead He chose to heal mankind in a different way, by taking on the hurt and darkness
Himself. And in doing so, we
realize just how dear we
are to Him. — Morgan L. Busse

When she sings that song you're with that elderly couple in that pub in Deptford and the mundane becomes romantic and beautiful and I think that's probably the great thing about any sort of paintings or music or something, is just when nothing becomes everything — Jools Holland

I feel guilty because I think people should do something they really like to do in life. I should do something else, but there is nothing I can do really well. I'm established and make a steady living, so it becomes pretty easy. It's not very fulfilling . . . but I'm lazy, I admit it. It's an easier thing to do. — Studs Terkel

For leveling really to come about a phantom must first be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage
this phantom is the public. Only a passionless but reflective age can spin this phantom out, with the help of the press when the press itself becomes an abstraction ... [and] the only thing that can keep life going in the prevailing torpor. — Soren Kierkegaard

In actuality, there's nothing to do about a useless, recurring depression. A person could become disconsolate or angry. Even if they're enraged enough to punch something, they won't find a target. A huge organization... they wish that some huge, evil organization existed. That becomes our dream... — Tatsuhiko Takimoto

Without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of being. Substance has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion.
In this way, communion becomes an ontological concept. Nothing in existence is conceivable in itself, as an individual. In this manner, it is communion which makes things 'be'.
But this communion is not a relationship understood for its own sake. Just like 'substance,' 'communion' does not exist by itself. This thesis introduces a concept of incalculable importance. For it means that the ultimate ontological category which makes something really *be*, is neither an impersonal and incommunicable 'substance,' nor a structure of communion existing by itself or imposed by necessity, but rather the *person*.
True being comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely - that is, who freely affirms his being, his identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons. — John D. Zizioulas

It is something cruelly incomprehensible to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, to whose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away again for want of a welcome. "Why will they not kindle up and be glad sometimes?" thinks young elasticity. "It would be so easy if they only liked to do it." And these leaden clouds that never part are apt to create impatience even in the filial affection that streams forth in nothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction. — George Eliot

Do you have a dream? If you do, what is it? Is your dream similar to mine? I hope that even more people dream the same dream as me, because my dream is so big I couldn't handle it by myself. If you are someone who has the same dream as me, this is what I have to say to you. Right now, you are planting a single tree. Right now, you are sowing a single seed. And you are beginning to knit something with one strange of yarn. The first step or two are nothing, but imagine that you continue that work for ten years. One tree becomes a forest, one seed becomes a field, and that single thread becomes a beautiful cloth. Believe in the life inside you, believe in the great and holy mind within you, and push forward with the dream you have chosen until you make it. — Ilchi Lee

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising. — Leo Ornstein

It took me a while to understand that when you don't like someone, nothing they can say or do will ever seem right. Something as harmless as giving a kid a cookie becomes something aggressive, a challenge to their authority. — Alexandra Bracken

Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling.
Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do.
Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect.
There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6) — Jeanette Winterson

Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty-four hours of our relationship. I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporal crossroads, some distinct moment at which I can walk away and keep it from happening, but I never do. I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn for the loss of something I never even had. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Nothing lives up to what you imagine. It changes, shifts, becomes something else. — Simon Kinberg

Have you watched it? A man who is too greedy about money, by and by starts having the qualities of money. He becomes just money. He loses spirituality, he is no more a spirit. He is reduced to a thing. If you love money, you will become like money. If you love your house, by and by you will become material. Whatsoever you love, you become. Love is alchemical. Never love the wrong thing, because it will transform you. Nothing is so transforming as love. Love something which can raise you higher, to higher altitudes. Love something beyond you. — Rajneesh

When you die you lose nothing, you are deprived of nothing. It becomes like before you were born and had nothing. You are deprived of something you wanted and you can only feel and want things if your senses work perfectly. The dead can't feel anything — Bangambiki Habyarimana

To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions? — Criss Jami

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country. — Seth Grahame-Smith

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself. — Ian McEwan

I fell into this business by accident. It wasn't something I ever aspired to be: an Actress . It just happened. It has evolved into an insane passion ... a creative outlet. But nothing more. It's my hobby ... one of the ways I express myself as an Artist . And the day it becomes a job ... a career ... I will quit ... — Shailene Woodley

May walked slowly around the body, studying it. Putrefaction had been halted in its advance, but the corpse's skin had turned green and black, producing an acrid odour. He found it hard to imagine that this man had recently been walking around, eating in restaurants, watching TV. He was someone's lover, someone's son, but there was almost nothing human left. Without a head his trunk bore an unsettling similarity to something you would find in a meat locker. How would his loved ones feel if they could see him like this? 'Get anything else?' 'It's tricky because the usual decay process has been interrupted by the relatively sterile storage of the body. Usually, after two to three days you get staining on the abdomen. The discolouration spreads, veins grow dark, the skin blisters after a week, tissue starts softening and nails fall off at around the three-week stage, and finally the face becomes unrecognisable as the skin liquefies - — Christopher Fowler

I do not want to presuppose anything as known. I see in my explanation in section 1 the definition of the concepts point, straight line and plane, if one adds to these all the axioms of groups i-v as characteristics. If one is looking for other definitions of point, perhaps by means of paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then, of course, I would most decidedly have to oppose such an enterprise. One is then looking for something that can never be found, for there is nothing there, and everything gets lost, becomes confused and vague, and degenerates into a game of hide and seek. — David Hilbert

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun. — Wallace Stegner

From the point of view of pure logic or philosophy, there will often be a dialectical tension between two concepts.
For example ...
If I reflect on the concept of 'being,' I will be obliged to introduce the opposite concept, that of 'nothing.' You can't reflect on your existence without immediately realizing that you won't always exist. The tension between 'being' and 'nothing' becomes resolved in the concept of 'becoming.' Because if something is in the process of becoming, it both is and is not. — Jostein Gaarder

The thing about being a songwriter is,even if you been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Everything has something to do with something; nothing is divorced. It becomes an experience,a feeling or a aconglomeration of experiences ... — Keith Richards

Your life will always be the perfect classroom journey for you and every experience that shows up in your journey is here to serve you. There is meaning and purpose behind everything that happens. There are no accidents which means your suffering through difficulties is never for nothing. Your life matters and everything you experience matters. Your trials are there to help you become a better person and trusting this is truth will take some of the sting out of them. Suffering becomes more bearable if it at least counts for something. — Kimberly Giles

Hate," says Roman. "It's such a small word. Four freaking letters. No big deal, right? Only, it is a big deal. People spend their entire lives holding on to it. Even if you no longer even remember the cause of the quarrel you hold on to that feeling because it becomes the only feeling you've ever known; because that feeling drives you towards achieving something and because it gives life meaning, gives you a sense of purpose. Without someone to hate you're just a burger-flipping failure who doesn't stand a chance. Without someone to hate you're just another millionaire, passing through life getting old and inching towards your death.
"Without hate, you're just nothing. — Sam Hunter

Courage is called for on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, even when there's nothing urgent at stake. It is up to us to create our lives consistent with who we know ourselves to be - making what's at stake that which we say is at stake. It's the stand we take on ourselves. That stand then becomes who we are. Saying that something is at stake is always a purely existential act. This business about freedom, this business about power, is really a product of a place to stand - not something that is out in front of us, that we're working on or measuring ourselves against. When we live consistent with what we say, we are being true to ourselves. — Nancy Zapolski

Music is really nothing if you think about it - it only becomes something when somebody listens to it. And then it becomes uncontrollable. — Gael Garcia Bernal

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behaviour, to other minds. — Aldous Huxley

Writing is the basis of all, because creating something that didn't even exist before is like taking an empty canvass. It is a wonderful thing to make something out of nothing. You've got an empty page, you've got an idea, and then you start typing and that is the most thrilling thing of all. And then if it becomes a movie or something else that's a plus, but the original writing of it is what's very exciting. — Carl Reiner

The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant. — Rainer Maria Rilke

To be motherly is a totally different phenomenon. It is something absolutely human; it transcends animality. It has nothing to do with biology. It is love, pure love, unconditional love. When a mother loves unconditionally - and only a mother can love unconditionally - the child learns the joy of unconditional love. The child becomes capable of loving unconditionally. And to be able to love unconditionally is to be religious. And it is the easiest thing for a woman to do. It is easy for her because naturally she is ready for it. — Rajneesh

Have you ever wanted something so desperately that you imagine it, day in and day out, until you have created an image of perfection that becomes the 'real thing'? Suddenly, all you have to live for is the image in your head that may not be real to anyone else in the world, but is most certainly real to you. Nothing is as perfect, not even the thing itself, as the image you have created in your mind. — Leigh Hershkovich

When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to. — Carlos Castaneda

I think they call that parallas: being able to know the distance of something because you're seeing it from two separate points - and the farther apart those two points are, the more accurate you can be. Put one eye here and one eye fourteen feet away, and you know a whole lot more about the world you're seeing.
The thing is, if you go through life with just your own point of view, you're like that kid with glass eye. If there's something that's right up in your face, it looks really big - overwhelming even. But if you've got that parallax - if you've got that other point of view - you realize that there are bigger, much more important things that are far off toward the horizon. Once you focus on those things rather than the way up close, that close-up stuff becomes nothing more than a nuisance blocking the view. — Neal Shusterman

There is no always," I say. "Nothing persists forever."
"Nothingness persists," she says. She is testing me.
"No. So long as anything exists, nothingness is impossible. In fact, it's nothingness that cannot persist. Nothingness gives way to somethingness. The nothingness that preceded the Big Bang was obliterated. Nothing became something. — Michael Grant

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not. — Jean-Luc Godard

Sometimes in your life you just meet someone or hear something that nudges you on the right path. And that becomes the best advice. It could just be a bit of commonsense said in a way that resonates with something in you. It's nothing new, but because it connects with you it holds meaning for you. — Chetan Bhagat

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. — Naomi Alderman

In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say. — William E. Hordern

I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. These properties we can only speak of when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view. — Nikola Tesla

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified
a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands
or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river. — Margaret Laurence

I was honored and pleased that she was confiding in me in this fashion. I met her eyes, and for the first time I perceived that there was something broken behind them, like a tiny crack in a diamond that becomes visible only when viewed through a magnifying lens; normally it is hidden by the brilliance of the stone. I wanted to know what it was, what had caused her to create the pearl of which she had spoken. But I thought it would be presumptuous of me to ask; such things are revealed by a person when and to whom they choose. So I attempted to convey through my expression alone my desire to understand her and said nothing further. — Mohsin Hamid

Rebecca, we live in a world where darkness seems, in the minds of many, something banished to the world of fairy tales and superhero movies. How surprising it then becomes - even for those of us who believe otherwise - that it may appear in our own lives, in our own battles. To face an opponent that is more than the average 'jerk,' who has made a deadly choice, is, let us admit it, nothing that we expect to experience. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know. — Aldous Huxley

The standard cosmological theory
an expanding universe
does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology. — R. Joseph Hoffmann