Quotes About Emptiness

There's not enough of me left over.

And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation.

eath, when it finally arrives, does so in a surprising fashion: it adds nothing to the room, not a light or a spark or a sound; death does not stir a molecule of the air. You know it arrives because there is suddenly a subtraction. You will feel it before you know it.

I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn't have to actually face them.

I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be.

This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic—seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I'm blank. So it's like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside.

I wasn't cold, I wasn't anything at all I was only a blur.

It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't. . .

And no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.

now, be happy. But I'm not. I feel nothing. When I 'm honest with myself, I know that the only emotion I've felt in years is being tired. Not physically tired. Just tired. It's as if…as if there were nobody there to feel any more. But that's not all. There's something much worse. It's doing something horrible to me. I'm beginning to hate people…

He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

Few places favor meditation more than the desert

Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.

Kris," Harey whispered even more softly than before. I felt rather than heard her coming noiselessly up to me, and I pretended I hadn't noticed. At that moment I wanted to be alone. I had to be alone. I still hadn't found strength inside myself. I'd reached no decision, no resolution. As I stared at the darkening sky, at the stars that were only a spectral shadow of terrestrial stars, I stood there motionless; in the emptiness that was gradually

Wpatrzony w ciemniejÄ…ce niebo, w gwiazdy, które byÅ'y tylko widmowym cieniem ziemskich gwiazd, staÅ'em bez ruchu, a w pustce, która zastÄ™powaÅ'a gonitwÄ™ myÅ›li sprzed chwili, rosÅ'a bez sÅ'ów martwa, obojÄ™tna pewno??, ?e tam, dokÄ…d nie mogÅ'em siÄ™gn??, wybraÅ'em ju? i udajÄ…c, ?e nic siÄ™ nie staÅ'o, nie miaÅ'em nawet tyle siÅ'y, ?eby sobÄ… wzgardzi?.

A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead, nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance - or rather I have no body, I am that alien matter.

We built a world of words and yet none satisfy now.

T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend.

I cannot help but see the void in which I am standing as a metaphor for emptiness: the absence of compulsive reactivity, a precondition for the unimpeded space of paths that allow human flourishing. The unadorned simplicity of this rock-cut shrine evokes the Buddha's dharma before it mutated into dogma. This is nirvana inscribed in stone. Until the idea of emptiness was hijacked by metaphysicians, it was just another way of talking about solitude.

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial.

I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person. Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.

Were mind and matter me, I would come and go like them. If I were something else, They would say nothing about me. —N?G?RJUNA, M?lamadhyamaka-k