True Nothingness Quotes & Sayings

What do I know about love? Not much-that's the safe answer. Even when I think I have a grasp on it, something comes along to make me realize I don't know anything at all. It's just a concept to me. It's the thing that all the songs are written about, the thing that makes smart people act stupidly. If I can make love a concept, it makes me a better observer. And it also leaves a place inside of me hollow. Sometimes I can actually feel it. To reach down inside that part-I wonder how it would feel, to touch a void. That nameless empty.
This makes me seem lonely, which isn't really true. I have other parts of me - friendship, for one - which compensate for the void. I can't feel the nothingness except in those rare times when there's nothing else to feel. — David Levithan

Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work - of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the "What am I?" Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds. — Alexandre Kojeve

When you awaken to true nothingness and all the empty fictions you once thought of as "Me" disappear, then self-existent life without beginning and without end finally touches your heart. — Ilchi Lee

It is not true that you feel something when you are in an accident. There is no feeling, no thought. You do and you do not exist, like a particle of dust swirling in the air. You see the blue sky and you are part of it, you are a part of the air, the water, the greenery in the park. You drift in a silence where you cannot even hear the beating of your own heart. Isn't that the experience of nothingness? — Slavenka Drakulic

Eckhart tells us that God 'must' give birth to himself in us fully and at all times. He has no choice in the matter; this is simply his nature. If we do not receive the spiritual benefits of this birth, then that is because we are not content to allow God to act in us. Rather, we obstruct him with our false notions of self and the determination to cling to the nothingness which is the true reality of our own creaturely being. — Meister Eckhart

If there is, to be sure, something more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires, it is the history of the death of religions. Volney himself was overcome by this feeling as he visited the innumerable ruins of once-sacred buildings. The true believer may still escape from this impression, but with the inherent scepticism of our age all of us must sometime tremble to find so many dark gates opening out on to nothingness. — Gerard De Nerval

The book the reader has now before his eyes - from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever the omissions, the exceptions, or the faults - is the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end. — Victor Hugo

Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - On Life — Percy Bysshe Shelley

This nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples. Instead, it is again a specifically Western nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost manifestation of all the forcesopposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative nothingness[113] that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true essence[114] until it soon disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded. Life, history, family, people, language, faith - the list could go on forever because nothingness spares nothing - all fall victim to nothingness.[115] — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them ... there is nothing. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. (34) Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.(7) Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness ... We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden reality ... (281) God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. (41) — Thomas Merton

The call to humility has been too little regarded in the church because its true nature and importance have been too little apprehended. It is not something that we bring to God, or that He bestows; it is simply the sense of entire nothingness that comes when we see how truly God is everything. — Andrew Murray

True humility is a Christian grace and one of the fruits of the Spirit, originating in a deep consciousness of sin past and present, and leading us to discover our nothingness in the view of God, our insufficiency for any thing that is good, and prompting us, as we feel our infirmities, to strive after higher and yet higher attainments. — James McCosh

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason. — Richard Wright

To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair. — Eric Hoffer

Seeing into one's self-nature is seeing into nothingness. Seeing into nothingness is true seeing & eternal seeing — Shenhui

while the earth, which in reality is only an imperceptible point in nature, appears to our fond imaginations as something so grand and noble. He then represented to himself the human species, as it really is, as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being — Voltaire

Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the true joy of life. — Shunryu Suzuki

I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position of nothingness. And I think this is true. I don't think I'm anything; I never have thought that. Whatever it is that activates it is a certain kind of energy that goes on. But the effect is ridiculous; it's absurd."
--Lincoln Kirstein in "The New Yorker — Lincoln Kirstein

No matter what stage we are at in our spiritual journey, whether we are beginners or have been traveling a spiritual path for years or decades; and no matter how awakened or asleep we are, there is always absolute truthfulness - the oneness and nothingness - which is our true nature. Our true nature doesn't need any explanation or demonstration to know itself. It just knows because knowing is part of its nature. This true nature resides in everyone. This is the meaning of the statement that everyone is already enlightened. — Ilchi Lee

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. — Czeslaw Milosz

Seen like that, he was just a shadow; darkness, a nothingness, before real power. The men of this world, epics included, would pass from time. I might be a worm to him, but he was a worm himself in the grand scheme of the universe. — Brandon Sanderson

Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. And if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny Him. — George MacDonald

Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they'll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness. — Rebecca McNutt

In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning. — Cyrano De Bergerac

Everything comes out of nothingness and goes back into nothingness. Hence there is no need for attachment, because attachment will bring misery. Soon it will be gone. The flower that has blossomed in the morning, by the evening will be gone. Don't get attached; otherwise in the evening there will be misery. Then there will be tears, then you will miss the flower. Enjoy while it is. But remember, it has come out of nothing, and it will go back to nothing. And the same is true about everything, even about people. — Rajneesh

Meditation," said his teacher, "hasn't got a damn thing to do with anything, 'cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn't develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It's then and exactly then that you're sensing the true nature of the universe, you're linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you're content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there's the only place to be. — Tom Robbins

A true genius is my brother, for his ability to measure and adapt his imagination to knowledge is unbounded. He can turn laziness into tactics. He can drop tactics for strategy without anyone or anything realizing it. He can comprehend grand principles of creation effortlessly and flawlessly. His capacity for knowledge surpasses even my own, and it's not because he constantly takes steps forward. It's because he has unconsciously taught himself to understand the principles behind possibility and nothingness. That is a true genius. — Lionel Suggs

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

The true asset before any human being on this planet are... Enthusiasm & Will... with these everything comes from nothingness & devoid of them everything perishes to nothingness... — Dinesh Kumar