Emptiness Quotes - Page 11

• The past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?

  Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

  Memories, Past, Trying

  90 Copy quote

• There is something more important than the place being left. It's that swell of crushing emptiness that makes the insignificant seem anything but.

  Lucas Mann

  Crush, Important, Insignificant

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness.

  Miriam Toews

  Grieving, Towns, Happens

  Miriam Toews (2004). “A Complicated Kindness: A Novel”, A.A. Knopf Canada

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept His offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness, and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew.

  Pope Francis

  Jesus, Loneliness, Heart

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.5, BookBaby

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations.

  Jamgon Kongtrul

  Purity, Concepts

  9 Copy quote

• Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars.

  Robert Beer

  Stars, Spring, Work

  7 Copy quote

• Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

  Ted Nelson

  People, Pretending

  10 Copy quote

• And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

  T. S. Eliot

  Voice, Singing, Exhausted

  T.S. Eliot (2015). “The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems”, p.697, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you go searching for the Great Creator, you will come back empty-handed. The source of the universe is ultimately unknowable, a great invisible river flowing forever through a vast and fertile valley. Silent and uncreated, it creates all things.

  Laozi

  Rivers, Forever, Valleys

  Laozi, Brian Browne Walker (1992). “Hua Hu Ching: Teachings of Lao Tzu”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• His peaceful resistance shook the foundations of an empire, exposed the emptiness of a repressive ideology, and proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.

  Barack Obama

  Inspiring, Powerful, Moral Leadership

  Statement on the death of Vaclav Havel, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. December 18, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it . . . holy if only . . . we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.

  Helen Keller

  Life, Prayer, Hate

  Helen Keller (2007). “My Religion”, p.185, Book Tree

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

  George Steiner

  Children, Stories, Kind

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.219, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I need not to be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it. To try to escape from it is to try to live a lie. It is also to cease to be. My acceptance of despair and emptiness constitutes my being; to have the courage to accept despair is to be.

  Michael Novak

  Lying, Acceptance, Despair

  Michael Novak (1970). “The Experience of Nothingness”, p.67, Transaction Publishers

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Before there can be fullness there must be emptiness. Before God can fill us with Himself we must first be emptied of ourselves.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Firsts, Worship, Fullness

  56 Copy quote

• Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Life, Mean, Empty

  36 Copy quote

• If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Independent, Dying

  4 Copy quote

• A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

  Ayn Rand

  Zero, Suffering, Weakness

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.32, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A vessel is formed from a lump of clay with care, however, it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.

  Laozi

  Space, Clay, Care

  9 Copy quote

• We put thirty spokes to make a wheel: But it is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges. We make a vessel from a lump of clay; But it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. We make doors and windows for a room; But it is the empty spaces that make the room livable. Thus, while existence has advantages, It is the emptiness that makes it useful.

  Laozi

  Doors, Space, Clay

  6 Copy quote

• 'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine ; forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything; While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls

  Kenneth Patchen

  Book, Fall, Wine

  Kenneth Patchen (1968). “The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen”, p.112, New Directions Publishing

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mind remains undetermined in the great Void. Here the highest knowledge is unbounded. That which gives things their thusness cannot be delimited by things. So when we speak of 'limits', we remain confined to limited things. The limit of the unlimited is called 'fullness.' The limitlessness of the limited is called 'emptiness.' Tao is the source of both. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness

  Zhuangzi

  Giving, Mind, Void

  30 Copy quote

• When you are so full that there is no emptiness in you, that you have started feeling the significance of the ordinary, day-to-day existence, when moment to moment you live totally, intensely, passionately, then God is available.

  Rajneesh

  Ordinary Days, Feelings, Celebration

  4 Copy quote

• Now the Apostle, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says, "Knowledge inflates: but love edifies." The only correct inerpretation of this saying is that knowledge is valuable when charity informs it. Without charity, knowledge inflates; that is, it exalts man to an arrogance which is nothing but a kind of windy emptiness.

  Saint Augustine

  Inspiration, Men, Arrogance

  5 Copy quote

• Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren't my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

  Phil McGraw

  People, Goal, Expectations

  Dr. Phil McGraw (2003). “Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.

  Karl Jaspers

  Fear, Faces, Filled

  51 Copy quote