55 Quotes About Emptiness

Emptiness is a concept that resonates deeply with many, touching on feelings of longing, introspection, and the quest for meaning. In our fast-paced world, it's not uncommon to experience moments of emptiness that prompt reflection on our lives and relationships. Whether it's through the quiet solitude of a serene landscape or the profound words of a thoughtful writer, these moments can lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. In this collection, we've gathered 55 of the most poignant quotes about emptiness, offering insights that range from the melancholic to the hopeful, and providing a source of comfort and inspiration for those navigating the complexities of human emotion.

1. “Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

2. “Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.” - Jeanette Winterson

3. “What happens to the drop of wineThat you pour into the sea?Does it remain itself, unchanged?It is as if it never existed.So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,It is united with Truth,Its old nature fades away,It is no longer master of itself.The soul wills and yet does not will:Its will belongs to Another.It has eyes only for this beauty;It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont--It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.The base of this highest of peaksIs founded on nichil,Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord.” - Jacopone Da Todi

4. “New eyes awaken.I send Love's name into the world with wingsAnd songs grow up around me like a jungle.Choirs of all creatures sing the tunesYour Spirit played in Eden.Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradiseShine on the face of the abyssAnd I am drunk with the great wildernessOf the sixth day in Genesis.But sound is never half so fairAs when that music turns to airAnd the universe dies of excellence.Sun, moon and starsFall from their heavenly towers.Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,All fear another wind, another thunder:Then one more voiceSnuffs all their flares in one gust.And I go forth with no more wine and no more starsAnd no more buds and no more EdenAnd no more animals and no more sea:While God sings by himself in acres of nightAnd walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.” - Thomas Merton

5. “Mine could not be a story about the building of character, but about its erosion, about the slow accumulation of small forces and events that ultimately dries the soul and leaves the heart empty.” - Gonzalo Munevar

6. “I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?” - Guy de Maupassant

7. “We become aware of the void as we fill it.” - Antonio Porchia

8. “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” - Sylvia Plath

9. “There's just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise. ” - Sarah Dessen

10. “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

11. “I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” - Sylvia Plath

12. “The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. We are back in the Byzantine situation, where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal from itself the fact that God no longer exists. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.” - Jean Baudrillard

13. “When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. It just didn't make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too. More important: Not only would it be pointless, it would have been pointless all along.This was an obscure and rather difficult point to grasp. Understanding of it kept slipping in and out on the edges of his mind. It flickered, changing its time sense and tenses. At those moments when he understood it, it left him with a very hollow feeling.” - James Jones

14. “Become totally emptyQuiet the restlessness of the mindOnly then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness” - Laotzu

15. “Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.” - Haruki Murakami

16. “Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That's why the second most abused word is "forever".” - Peter Craig

17. “I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.” - Haruki Murakami

18. “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.” - Haruki Murakami

19. “His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.” - J.M. Coetzee

20. “But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

21. “I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.” - Stanislaw Lem

22. “At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing-- a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.” - David James Duncan

23. “[in the true mad north] of introspection,where 'falcons of the inner eye'dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

24. “There are people in the world, who are just wrong, and then there are the masses of population that are right, or at the very least they lie in the veil of between. I on the other hand, do not belong to any group. I don’t exist. It’s not that I don’t have substance; I have a body like everyone else. I can feel the fire when it burns against my skin, the rain when it caresses my face and the breeze as it fingers my hair. I have all the senses that other people do. I am just empty, inside.” - J.D. Stroube

25. “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” - Woody Allen

26. “It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.” - James Richardson

27. “The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.” - Candace Bushnell

28. “I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.” - Mark Z. Danielewski

29. “In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” - Carl Sagan

30. “But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.” - Alice Hoffman

31. “Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.” - C.S. Lewis

32. “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

33. “a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel; really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels; 'i need to go read my blog to find out what my politics are” - Tao Lin

34. “That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.” - Vladimir Bartol

35. “Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken.” - Robert Fripp

36. “Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.” - Malcolm Cowley

37. “What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.” - Frederick Barthelme

38. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form" states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.” - Eckhart Tolle

39. “For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.” - Gustave Flaubert

40. “It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.” - Jackson Pearce

41. “We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

42. “If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

43. “...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.” - Michelle Latiolais

44. “vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” - Milan Kundera

45. “Looking aroundthere is nothing but illusionEverything is drownedin the oceans of illusion” - Rixa White

46. “What infinite heart's-easeMust kings neglect, that private men enjoy!And what have kings, that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st moreOf mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?O ceremony, show me but thy worth!What is thy soul of adoration?Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,Creating awe and fear in other men?Wherein thou art less happy being fear'dThan they in fearing.What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!Think'st thou the fiery fever will go outWith titles blown from adulation?Will it give place to flexure and low bending?Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;I am a king that find thee, and I know'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,The farced title running 'fore the king,The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pompThat beats upon the high shore of this world,No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,Not all these, laid in bed majestical,Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,Who with a body fill'd and vacant mindGets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,But, like a lackey, from the rise to setSweats in the eye of Phoebus and all nightSleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,And follows so the ever-running year,With profitable labour, to his grave:And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.The slave, a member of the country's peace,Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wotsWhat watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,Whose hours the peasant best advantages.” - William Shakespeare

47. “Empty, I echo to the least footfall” - Sylvia Plath

48. “The presence of the inner feeling of emptiness directs our attention to a past experience of guilt and to our inner feeling awareness of the cause in the past. We must be sensitive to that feeling and accept it in order to chase down the cause, ferret it out, reassess the value of the experience to us in order not to further project the blame in anger outward to an external cause.” - Martha Char Love

49. “I am so sad. I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts. I shift, restless, but it doesn’t help. It’s like—time. All this time in here is on me, has its hooks in me. Maybe if I sleep more, I’ll wake up and I’ll feel different, but I can’t. The storm is really happening now and it makes the room feel emptier. Makes me feel emptier.” - Courtney Summers

50. “Love is not an exclusive relationship with another person; love is the quality that arises when we are in contact with our inner being, with our authentic self, with the meditative quality within, with the inner silence and emptiness. This inner emptiness is experienced by others and is expressed on the outside as love. This love is not addressed to a specific person; it is a presence and quality that surrounds a person like a fragrance.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

51. “The inner woman is the source of healing. The inner woman is the source of silence. The inner woman is the source of love. The inner woman is the source of belongingness with life. Embracing the inner man and woman is to discover our inner roots and wings.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

52. “My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.” - Katherine Paterson

53. “Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.” - Louise Erdrich

54. “He just wanted to stop thinking. It was easier that way. The numbness hadn't left him; if anything it was spreading. When he looked at the pictures, there was no emotion, even though he knew there should be. He should be sad.But he wasn't.He felt nothing.The drinking didn't help.Somewhere in the darkest recess of his brain, a button was pushed. Everything he cared about simply vanished. He'd malfunctioned.” - Jeyn Roberts

55. “There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.” - Steve V. Cypert