Emptiness Quotes - Page 28

• Teamwork - everything is one. You can connect with the emptiness of all things. All things are empty.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teamwork, Health, Buddhism

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• Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.

  Benjamin Hoff

  Spiritual, Loneliness, People

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• The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way.

  Silvano Arieti

  Frustration, Creative, Unbearable

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• How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Life, Nice, Numbness

  Kurt Vonnegut (1988). “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut”, p.140, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

  Arundhati Roy

  Grief, Night, Law

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• It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Life, Feelings, Empty

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.37, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Let your tears fall because of sin; but, at the same time, let the eye of faith steadily behold the Son of man lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that those who are bitten by the old serpent may look unto Jesus and live. Our sinnership is that emptiness into which the Lord pours his mercy.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Fall, Eye

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• Throughout history there have been many men and women who have chosen to imitate Jesus as he withdraws into the desert... To pass time in the desert means to create a little emptiness and silence around us, to rediscover the road to our heart, to remove ourselves from the noise and external distractions, to enter into contact with the deepest source of our being and our faith.

  Raniero Cantalamessa

  Faith, Jesus, Inspiration

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• O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!

  Gary Snyder

  Heart, Compassion, Awareness

  Gary Snyder (2009). “Mountains and Rivers Without End: Poem”, p.151, Counterpoint

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• Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.

  Cornel West

  Spiritual, Addiction, Suffering

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• One wants to be loved, in lack thereof admired, in lack thereof feared, in lack thereof loathed and despised. One wants to instill some sort of emotion in people. The soul trembles before emptiness and desires contact at any price.

  Hjalmar Söderberg

  People, Soul, Desire

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• An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

  Sebastian Horsley

  Pain, Artist, Blood

  "Horsley's cross is a painful one to bare" by Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• There's a hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music.... When you're full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should.

  Rumi

  Spirit, Satan, Drink

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• Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.

  Geneen Roth

  Heart, Successful, Loss

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• If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Passion, Dark, Men

  Soren Kierkegaard (2005). “Fear and Trembling”, p.18, Penguin UK

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• You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Law, Firsts, Spirit

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• When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Children, Heart

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• Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

  George Orwell

  Men, Thinking, Perfection

  "Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun". Tribune, December 20, 1943.

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• In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Country, Names, Together

  Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.241, Macmillan

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• We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Existentialism, Praying, Immortality

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• Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.

  Xiaolu Guo

  Regret, Past, Looks

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• There is no emptiness without appearance, and there is no appearance without emptiness. That is what we call the interdependent nature.

  Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

  Buddhist, Appearance

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• "It pleases the Father that ALL fulness" should be there; and therefore there is nothing but emptiness anywhere else.

  William Gadsby

  Christian, Jesus, Father

  "Sermons, fragments of sermons and letters". ed. by J. Gadsby,

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• A life without love, no matter how many other things we have, is an empty, meaningless one.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Matter, Empty, Life Without Love

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• Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.

  Richard J. Foster

  Loneliness, Solitude, Fulfillment

  Richard J. Foster (1995*). “Richard Foster's treasury of Christian discipline”, Jossey-Bass

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