Void Quotes - Page 16

• Man ought always to have something that he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will seem to him tiresome and void.

  Johann Gottfried Seume

  Inspirational, Men, Ought

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• Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on Earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.

  Victor Hugo

  Ignorance, Fate, Men

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• All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Color, Profound, Masters

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “My Name Is Red”, p.92, Faber & Faber

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• Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

  Roger Scruton

  Space, Building, Dialogue

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• At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.

  David Berlinski

  Pain, Eye, Ideas

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• Every light has a point where it is brightest and a point toward which it wanders to lose itself completely. It must be intercepted to fulfill its mission; it cannot function in a void. Light can go straight, penetrate and turn back, be reflected and deflected, gathered and spread, bent as by a soap bubble, made to sparkle and be blocked. Where it is no more is blackness, and where it begins is the core of its brightness. The journey of rays from that central core to the outposts of blackness is the adventure and drama of light.

  Josef von Sternberg

  Drama, Adventure, Journey

  Josef Von Sternberg (1988). “Fun in a Chinese Laundry”

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• When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context.

  Jonathan Hale

  Attitude, House, Effort

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• All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.

  William Hazlitt

  Landscape, Form, Said

  Of Turner's painting, quoted in J Lindsay Turner: The Man and his Art (1985).

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• One man watches a river flow by. If he does not wish it to flow, to change ceaselessly in accord with its nature, he will suffer great pain. Another man understands that nature of the river is to change constantly, regardless of his likes and dislikes, and therefore he does not suffer. To know existence as this flow, empty of lasting pleasure, void of self, is to find that which is stable and free of suffering, to find true peace in the world.

  Ajahn Chah

  Pain, Men, Self

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• Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Law, Null, Today

  Woman's Rights to the Suffrage Speech, 1873.

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• Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence.

  Meister Eckhart

  Soul, May, Praise

  Meister Eckhart (2007). “Meister Eckhart's Sermons”, p.37, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Space, Headstone, Smallest

  Walter Savage Landor (1876). “Life, by J. Forster”, p.91

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• The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Dream, Inspiration, Artist

  "Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons". Book by Igor Stravinsky, 1947.

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• APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697

  Ambrose Bierce

  Wine, Yield, Mad

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2356, Delphi Classics

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• The more you surrender to the fear of someone's disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone's approval. Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem. When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Self Esteem, Eye, Acceptance

  Nathaniel Branden (1998). “Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality”, p.173, Simon and Schuster

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• There are some liberals eager to embrace a culture void of morals, but the majority of America is made up of honest, hard-working families who turned out in droves to protect the traditional way of life.

  John Doolittle

  Hard Work, America, Majority

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• Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void.

  Victor Hugo

  Mind, Too Much, Spontaneity

  Victor Hugo (2000). “Les Mis??rables”, p.116, Modern Library

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• When the world careens out of control, we can rest in the fact that God spun this world with a simple word. Matter from emptiness. Beauty from void. Community from chaos.

  Mary E. DeMuth

  Simple, Community, World

  Mary E DeMuth (2012). “Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus”, p.5, Thomas Nelson

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• The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

  Jules Renard

  Yield, Poet, Rings

  Jules Renard (2008). “The Journal of Jules Renard”, p.250, Tin House Books

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• For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Science, Self, Views

  Rudyard Kipling, M.M. Kaye (2002). “Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse”, Kyle Cathie Limited

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• Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

  Franz Kafka

  Party, Judging, World

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

  Umberto Eco

  Believe, Names, Giving

  Umberto Eco (2006). “The Island of the Day Before”, p.487, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Marriage, Smart, Men

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• The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Music, Spring, Fall

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• I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that - mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, 'I must put a roof on this lavatory.

  Les Dawson

  Stars, Moon, Night

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