Nothingness Quotes

“I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria e Outros Poemas

“What is next to ecstasy?
Pain.
What is next to pain?
Nothingness.
What is next to nothingness?
Hell.”
― Umera Ahmed

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”
― Emil Cioran

“Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Espere" in Spanish, is the one word covering two meanings: "waiting" and "hoping". If life, however, offers no expectation or prospect, waiting represents time "wasted”. Waiting needs a future. If not, time is condemned to be "killed". In the event that we are lost in a gap of boredom and despair, we are driven back in a vacuum of senselessness and deadlocked in a point of nothingness. We are, so therefore, bound to watch the agony of "time". ("Waiting for a place behind the geraniums " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I preach darkness. I don't inspire hope—only shadows. It's up to you to find the light in my words.”
― Charles Lee

“Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets?”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Happiness is finding peace with ourselves and ensuring a sound haven for our dreams and, at the same time, acknowledging our nothingness in front of nature's splendor. ("When is Happiness?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us not neglect rituals. They can be the watchdogs for the survival of our mental health, warning us when a well-oiled functioning of our life story is about to disrupt. Rituals can be safeguards hindering us from stumbling into the abyss of nothingness. Rituals can be anchor points providing guidance on our potholed path for the future. ("Digging for white gold" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.”
― Philip Larkin

“Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“Right at that moment it was as if we were the only two people left in the world. And I don't mean that to sound corny; it just honestly did. The only sounds were the droning crickets and chip-chips of the bats, the farawy wind against the sand, and the occasional distant yowl of a dingo. There were no car horns.No trains. No jack-hammers. No lawnmowers No planes. No sirens. No alarms. No anything human. If you'd told me that you'd saved me from a nuclear holocaust, I might have believed you.”
― Lucy Christopher, Stolen

“How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.

The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world’s
silence in a circle dance”
― Robert Walser, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.”
― James Patterson, The Christmas Wedding

“I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.”
― Charles Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones

“It hurts, doesn't it? Giving someone everything you can think of. The wings to fly and roots to stay and yet watch them choose none of those, leaving you hanging in the middle of void and nothingness.”
― Akshay Vasu

“We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“Wishing to grab the life with nothingness
wanting to erase the sigh of tiredness
forgetting myself completely from my being
why do I seek embrace of yours
do not ask me, I know not,
I am in oblivion.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“When everyone is trying to be something, be nothing. Range with emptiness. Human should be like a pot. As the pot is hold by its emptiness inside, human is hold by the awareness of his nothingness.”
― Shams Tabrizi

“In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“It's strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination.”
― Aldo Palazzeschi, Man of Smoke

“May you find what you are looking for and realize it is not the answer.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2