Nothingness Quotes - Page 6

• What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

  E. B. White

  Mean, Thinking, Would Be

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• Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

  Isaac Asimov

  Death, Suicide, Atheist

  Isaac Asimov (1992). “Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine”

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• It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

  Albert Einstein

  Order, Feelings, Desire

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• Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Path, Divine, Circuits

  Essays "Spiritual Laws" (1841)

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• The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Boys, Night, Light

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.24, Vintage

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• What is incarnation? Incarnation is self-reflection. The universe that we are in is constructed, is a reflection of ourselves. We picked the dimension according to our self-reflection.

  Frederick Lenz

  Reflection, Self, Dimensions

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

  Jerry Saltz

  Topography, Alternatives, World

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

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• When all the faces have been rejected and emptiness is left, you have found the original face. Emptiness is the original face. Zero is the ultimate experience. Nothingness - or more accurately NO-THINGNESS - is your original face.

  Rajneesh

  Zero, Faces, Emptiness

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• Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

  Art Spiegelman

  Hands, Silence, Unnecessary

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• Bullies enjoy dark happiness; these are the blank parts that eventually fill their minds with nothingness.

  Emily Shanks

  Bullying, Dark, Mind

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• If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Morning, Wall, Night

  Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2006.

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• When I die I won't go to heaven or hell; there will just be nothingness.

  Isaac Asimov

  Heaven, Religion, Atheism

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

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Existentialism, Episodes, Regard

  Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. J. Payne (1974). “Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays”, p.299, Oxford University Press

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• Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Science, Men, Self

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• When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.

  Pablo Picasso

  Tired, Relax, Doing Nothing

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• When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability.

  Robert Lanza

  Animal, Smell, Kitchen

  "Robert Lanza doesn't seem to be kidding" by Adam Rogers, www.wired.com. March 8, 2007.

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• I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Determination, Struggle, Past

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.140, Cambridge University Press

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• My loneliness...still comes over me sometimes...It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing.

  Marco Roth

  Dog, Loneliness, Writing

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• Many mothers are wholly ignorant of the almost universal prevalence of secret vice, or self-abuse among the young. Why hesitate to say firmly and without quibble that personal abuse lies at the root of much of the feebleness, paleness, nervousness and good-for-nothingness of the entire community?

  John Harvey Kellogg

  Mother, Lying, Roots

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• One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke.

  Rajneesh

  Life, Funeral, One Day

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• Any time you got nothing to do - and lots of time to do it - come on up.

  Mae West

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• 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

  Philosophical, White, Black

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• Mind only comes into apparent existence through the action of perception. Mind appears to exist because it perceives.

  Frederick Lenz

  Perception, Mind, Action

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• There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo-Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness.

  E. T. Whittaker

  Supposing That, Atheism, Bangs

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• It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

  Gertrude Stein

  Time, Women, Philosophical

  Everybody's Autobiography (1937) ch. 2

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