Nothingness Quotes - Page 17

• At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Men, Self, Might

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• I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.

  Michael Gira

  Philosophy, Reading, School

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• A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  People, Belief, Solace

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• How could I tell the doctor what was wrong with me? I didn't understand it myself. I couldn't articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness. My fear was of the weather, the atmosphere, the very air. What good did safety tips do me now? 'Avoid water, metal objects, rooftops; stay off the telephone in a storm, don't think glass can protect you; even if a storm was 8 miles away, you're still not safe from a strike. Avoid life perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip, stay away from it all.

  Alice Hoffman

  Pain, Fear, Thinking

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• Living under capitalism, I like learning to feel comfortable with activity that does not result in success — since non-success is the norm. Trying your best and making it is not the norm — it’s propaganda. Of course I play with notions of hype, too... The entire Comatonse website is a sarcastic hype-engine, sprawling forever, overwhelming the viewer with nothingness.

  Terre Thaemlitz

  Sarcastic, Play, Hype

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• Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

  William Barrett

  Anxiety, Feelings, Uncanny

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• Nothing is more dreadful in life than the profound thought that death may only greet you with eternal nothingness.

  Elizabeth Kim

  Profound, May, Eternal

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• Let us protect our children; and let us not allow them to grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analysis without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Let us steer them away from the harmful chase after material things and the damaging passion for distractions... Let us educate them to stand with their feet rooted in God's earth, but with their heads reaching even into heaven, there to behold truth.

  Friedrich Frobel

  Children, Growing Up, Hard Work

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• What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

  Richard Wright

  Dream, Thinking, Justice

  Richard Wright (2010). “American Hunger”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• Hip-hop is a beautiful culture. It's inspirational, because it's a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness.

  Mos Def

  Beautiful, Hip Hop, Survivor

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• I like the sort of 'nothingness' of the jeans and the T-shirt. I feel that's about as close as I can get to the future because it seems like something so old that will always be, so I feel it's a safe bet for the future.

  Marc Jacobs

  Jeans, Safe, T Shirt

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• As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Lonely, Ego, Dawn

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• Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

  Mark Strand

  Ends, Describing

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• Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness

  Oswald Spengler

  Transition, Cosmic, Tension

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1961). “The Decline of the West...: Perspectives of world-history”

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• That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause.

  Harvey Mansfield

  Feminism, Nihilism, Causes

  Harvey Claflin Mansfield (2007). “Manliness”, p.147, Yale University Press

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• What if we're all like that? Like ghosts ... in someone's mind ... gradually fading ... fading ... until finally ... one day ... we just disappear ... drift into nothingness. Wouldn't that be sad?

  Walter Wykes

  Memories, What If, Mind

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• Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.

  Leon Bloy

  Doe, Weak, Source

  Léon Bloy, Jeanne Molbech Bloy (1937). “Letters to His Fiancée”

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• I've heard it said that grace is God reaching God's hands into the world. And the Bible tells us that we are part of the body of Christ, that if we let the Spirit move through us, we can become the hands of Christ on earth. Hands that heal, bless, unite, and love. I'd like to think God's hands are a bit like Grace's man hands—gentle but big, busy, and tough. God's hands are those of a creator—an artist who molded and shaped the universe out of a void, who hewed matter from nothingness.

  Cathleen Falsani

  Moving, Men, Thinking

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• What is next to ecstasy?
  Pain.
  What is next to pain?
  Nothingness.
  What is next to nothingness?
  Hell.

  Umera Ahmed

  Pain, Next, Hell

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• People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mysteics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness.

  Joe Queenan

  Believe, Book, Light

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• The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiciton?

  Galileo Galilei

  Simple, Thinking, Doe

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• Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel.

  James D. Watson

  Motivational, Hands, Tunnels

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• The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Happiness, Fall, Ends

  D. H. Lawrence, Dieter Mehl (2002). “The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird”, p.69, Cambridge University Press

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• They say martyrdom is the highest rank a believer can achieve! Do not believe in this! The highest rank is the life itself, it is the existence itself! There is no rank in death, but only nothingness! Rank exists only in life! Stick to the life, stay away from death! Neither kill nor die!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Life, Believe, Sticks

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• Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.

  Matthew Fox

  Letting Go, Fighting, Space

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