Emptiness Quotes - Page 21

• The important thing is to know why we want to dance. We dance a solitude that we have inside us and cannot occupy with anything. This gap, that emptiness to which we put movement is the TANGO.

  Carlos Gavito

  Solitude, Important, Movement

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• Space is an environment of emptiness. It offers no possibility for natural adaptation to any living organism - and particularly not to the highly sophisticated creature, man. Yet man has the ability to resolve this paradox through his intellectual power and creative faculties.

  Hubertus Strughold

  Men, Medicine, Space

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• The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. . . . When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Moon, Night, Sky

  D. H. Lawrence (1966). “Selected Poems of D.h. Lawrence”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Lying, Play, Voice

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• I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere

  W. S. Merwin

  Hands

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• People are beginning to realize that self-knowledge is not an end in itself. It's for the purpose of better relationships, so that we can give to our community. You can give from overflow. It's very hard to give from emptiness. . . . People who avoid self-knowledge cause a great deal of pain to themselves as well as to their families and friends.

  Jennifer James

  Pain, Self, People

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• Guilt is the sum total of: All the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves! Any form of self-hatred, self-rejection, feelings of worthlessness, sinfulness, inferiority, incompetence, failure, or emptiness. The feeling that there are things in us that are lacking or missing or incomplete.

  Kenneth Wapnick

  Self, Hatred, Missing

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• I am ashamed of my emptiness," said the Word to the Work. "I know how poor I am when I see you," said the Work to the Word.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Poor, Said, Ashamed

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Poems”, p.412, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

  Wallace Stevens

  Winter, Ice, Sky

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.319, Vintage

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• You prep, you prep, you prep. And on the day that you film, you let all of that go. I try to achieve emptiness as much as possible - the Zen thing - to let the deal come out of that nothing.

  Jeff Bridges

  Trying, Film, Achieve

  "THR Cover: Jeff Bridges' Revealing New Interview" by Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 12, 2011.

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• Men and women in their mutual attraction are driven to the very emptiness they are trying to avoid.

  Subhash Kak

  Men, Mutual Attraction, Trying

  "Recursionism and Reality". Book by Subhash Kak, 2002.

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• Having fallen from the eternal, the Evil One's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys.

  Denis de Rougemont

  Evil, Desire, Investing

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• Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.

  Bruno Schulz

  Summer, Wine, Squares

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• When you realize your own emptiness, that will be something, won't it?

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Realizing

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• And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Numbness, Voice, Water

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.

  Frederick Barthelme

  Numbness, Over You, Feelings

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• ...even after you've just won the Super Bowl -- especially after you've just won the Super Bowl -- there's always next year. If Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing, then the only thing is nothing -- emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.

  Tom Landry

  Winning, Years, Competition

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• It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.

  David Edelstein

  Glasses, Media, Brain

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• We drank a toast to innocence, we drank a toast to now. And tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how.

  Dan Fogelberg

  Alcohol, Drug, Innocence

  Song: Same Old Lang Syne, Album: The Innocent Age, 1981

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• Leave your thoughtlessness behind you then you may begin to understand. Clear the emptiness around you with the waving of your hand.

  Van Morrison

  Inspirational, Hands, May

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• With this darkness all around me, I like to be liked. In this emptiness and fear, I want to be wanted. Cause I love to be loved.

  Peter Gabriel

  Darkness, Low Self Esteem, Want

  Song: Love To Be Loved, Album: Us, 1992

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• Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

  Margaret Atwood

  Lying, Dark, Night

  Margaret Atwood (2011). “Wilderness Tips”, p.189, Anchor

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• if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.

  Agnes Repplier

  Lying, Drinking, Men

  Agnes Repplier (1891). “Points of View”, Boston Houghton, Mifflin 1893.

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• Meditation is not emptiness. That is a way of trying to talk about something that is impossible to put into words. It is a world of fullness, if anything.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Meditation, Trying

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• Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn't exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty, committing evil isn't wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception.

  Bodhidharma

  Karma, Wise, Wisdom

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.19, Macmillan

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