Quotes About Nothingness

The anxiety engendered by confronting the abyss of nothingness [of the loss of self] is more terrifying than the tortures of hell. In the vision of hell, I am punished and tortured—In the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness—because I cannot say 'I' any more.

We come from nothing & return to nothing, but in between we're supposed to lead lives of grace and courage?

A beleza será convulsiva ou não será nada.

Minha morte só tomará de mim eu mesmo; é por isso que me tomará tudo e não me tomará nada, já que não haverá mais ninguém para ter perdido o que quer que seja.

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empt and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness.

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

No sane person fears nothingness.

Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

What if we're all like that? Like ghosts ... in someone's mind ... gradually fading ... fading ... until finally ... one day ... we just disappear ... drift into nothingness. Wouldn't that be sad?

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.

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

It is easier to believe that there was nothing before there was something than that there was something before there was nothing.

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.

Il tempo è ciò in grazia del quale ogni cosa, in ogni momento, diventa nulla nelle nostre mani.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.

The most astonishing observation one makes today is that people surrender everything in the face of nothingness: their own judgment, their humanity, their neighbors. Where this fear is exploited without scruple, there are no limits to what can be achieved.[130]

Nothing can be produced out of nothing.

Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it's about nothing.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

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

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.