36 Quotes About Embracing Nothingness

In a world that often equates busyness with purpose, the concept of embracing nothingness invites us to pause, reflect, and find meaning in the quiet spaces between our thoughts. This exploration of nothingness is not about emptiness or void, but rather an invitation to appreciate the simplicity and depth that can be found in moments of stillness. The following collection of quotes delves into this philosophical serenity, offering insights and reflections from various thinkers and writers who have pondered the profound beauty of embracing nothingness. Whether you're seeking inspiration, solace, or a new perspective, these quotes are sure to resonate with anyone looking to find peace amidst the chaos of everyday life.

1. “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

2. “Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?” - Fernando Pessoa

3. “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

4. “And in the livid night there creeps a basilisk, spawned by the moon after its strange fashion. The moon – eternally barren - is its father, but its mother is the sand, barren likewise: this is the mystery of the desert. Many say that it is an animal, but this is not so, it is a thought, growing there where there is no earth and no seed: a thought which sprang from that which is eternally barren, and now assumes strange forms which life does not know. This is the reason that no one can describe this being, because it is like nothingness, indescribable.” - Hanns Heinz Ewers

5. “Não sou nada.Nunca serei nada.Não posso querer ser nada.À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.” - Fernando Pessoa

6. “Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward whatlooks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.” - Alice Fulton

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

8. “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

9. “Perfection's stuck.” - Toba Beta

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

11. “Near below peak of mount Merbabu in Java, there is a forest known as the devil market. I had been there once. And when you are there, you will sense the crowd, voices of nothingness. Your mind will say it is just accustics effect of the nature, but your heart will tell you something totally different.” - Toba Beta

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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “...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

17. “Quand il mangeait des babas ou des éclairs, il se sentait coupable jusqu'à l'âme, à cause de la guerre, à cause des vendeuses dont les maris ou les amants se trouvaient sans doute quelque part, entre la mer du Nord et les Vosges. Mais il comprenait que Madeleine avait besoin de cette nourriture, justement pour tenir en échec ce vide, ce néant, cette nuit où elle était toujours sur le point de sombrer.” - Boileau-Narcejac

18. “Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that’s all.We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed 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

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

20. “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

21. “I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.” - Drew Magary

22. “I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.” - Mohsin Hamid

23. “He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.” - Henry Miller

24. “Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.” - Czesław Miłosz

25. “Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.” - Gore Vidal

26. “Absolute equals nothingness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

27. “Let go of your constant strife to sustain and assert the idea of who you are. It is this massive effort of defining your identity that keeps you wedged in the chronic routine of comparisons and conflicts with whoever and whatever appears to threaten this idea. If you have tried to assert yourself for many years and you have accomplished nothing, then be honest and do something different. Just be nothing. Try it for one day. Release your idea of being yourself, and just be nothing, be the void. And as you are being nothing you may realise that you can be all that is” - Franco Santoro

28. “How small life is hereand how big nothingness.The sky, tired of light,has given everything to the snow.The two trees bowtheir heads to each other.Clouds cross the world’ssilence in a circle dance” - Robert Walser

29. “His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.” - William Golding

30. “...strands of your hair and tendrils of the wind spin into nothingness the memories of that day...” - John Geddes

31. “He's a real nowhere man,Sitting in his Nowhere Land,Making all his nowhere plansfor nobody.Doesn't have a point of view,Knows not where he's going to,Isn't he a bit like you and me?” - The Beatles

32. “Love is not an idea, not a feeling, not a sensation, not a sentiment, not a passion, not even an emotion. It is becoming and being not... Ultimate nothingness! Complete self-annihilation!” - Raheel Farooq

33. “Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.” - Ira N. Barin

34. “History is the nothing people write about a nothing.” - William Golding

35. “Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”“Basically.”“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time.” - Haruki Murakami

36. “Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman...” - Neil Gaiman