Quotes About Emptiness

We shape clay into a pot, but it is emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -TAO TE CHING

I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought something, I wrote, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of something has always been and always will be you. I miss you.

meditation is not just about creating states of well-being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self.

The Buddhist word sunyata, or emptiness, has as its original, etymological meaning "a pregnant void, the hollow of a pregnant womb." When a therapist is able to create such a fertile condition, through the use of her own silence, the patient cannot help but come in contact with that which is still unfinished and with which he is still identified, albeit unawares.

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person's awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Form is emptiness, the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.

It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty.

What would your mother think about that?" which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can't say anything to people who are dead and dead people can't think.

heartbroken that lines so loyal, stubborn, and courageous for so long would come to a vacuous end.

There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren

Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.

If landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.

The universe has continued to deal in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.

The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we've never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I've been a sleep-walker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I've missed you all my life.

It's a long silence but far from empty.

I'd been the culinary equivalent of the Flying Dutchman too long, living a half-life with no future in mind, just oozing from sensation to sensation. I was a disgrace, a disappointment to friends and family and myself – and the drugs and the booze no longer chased that disappointment away.

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

Truly, he felt like "a cat biting on a urine bubble—all empty delight!

t's so lonely when you don't even know yourself.. it's so lonely.

Nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn't want to look at that.

Since the baby had died, they had had no other child.

It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future.

he was doing nothing, thinking of nothing, looking at nothing; he was merely suffering.

as he cared no longer for the light that lies in a lady's eye, there was not much left to him in the world but cards and racing.