Quotes About Emptiness

For days we slept wakefully, content to be nothing, to have no desires or hopes, to have forgotten the color of love or the taste of hatred.

I have in me like a haze Which holds and which is nothing A nostalgia for nothing at all, The desire for something vague. — Fernando Pessoa, opening lines to "[I have in me like a haze]," trans. Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

La inmensidad vacía de las cosas, el gran olvido que hay en el cielo y la tierra.

A vida é oca, a alma é oca, o mundo é oco. Todos os deuses morrem de uma morte maior que a morte. Tudo está mais vazio que o vácuo. E tudo um caos de coisas nenhumas.

By day they're full of meaningless activity; by night they're full of a meaningless lack of it.

Travel is for those who cannot feel.

Tedium … To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason … It's like being possessed by a negative demon

The total snuffing out of life and the soul, the complete banishment of all beings and people, the night without memory or illusion, the absence of past and future .....

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

Las grandes melancolías, las tristezas llenas de tedio no pueden existir sino en un ambiente confortable y de lujo sobrio.

We are hollow inside and out, pariahs of anticipation and promise.

I was free from having to feel. It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn't feel.

I, who have eyes that are only for seeing, See an absence of meaning in all things.

He vivido tanto sin haber vivido! ¡He pensado tanto sin haber pensado! Pesan sobre mí mundos de violencias detenidas, de aventuras vividas sin movimiento. Estoy harto de lo que nunca he tenido ni tendré, tedioso de dioses por existir. Llevo conmigo las heridas de todas las batallas que he evitado. Mi cuerpo muscular está molido por el esfuerzo que no he podido hacer.

I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing. Nothing, nothing, part of the night and the silence and what I share with them of vacancy, of negativity, of in-betweenness, a gap between me and myself, something forgotten by some god or other … 442

Desceu sobre nós a mais profunda e a mais mortal das secas dos séculos - a do conhecimento íntimo da vacuidade de todos os esforços e da vaidade de todos os propósitos.

En mi cielo interior no ha habido nunca una misera estrella.

Dormimos ali acordados dias, contentes de não ser nada, de não ter desejos nem esperanças, de nos termos esquecido da cor dos amores e do sabor dos ódios.

Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak.

I'M HELD by nothing, I hold on to nothing, I belong to nothing.

I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness. —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet . (Penguin Classics, 2002)

And all that remains is me, a poor abandoned child, whom no Love wanted as an adopted son, and no Friendship chose as a playmate.

There is something of my own disquiet in the steady drip and patter by which the day vainly empties out its sadness upon the earth.

All that I've had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distang light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I've had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.