Sunday, September 29, 2019 – Speaking of Nothing
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. ~ Robert Frost
Doing nothing is very hard to do. You never know when you’re finished. ~ Leslie Nielsen
Any time you’ve got nothing to do and lots of time to do it come on up. ~ Mae West
It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on. ~ Marilyn Monroe
Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense. ~ George Ade
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. ~ Samuel Beckett
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. ~ Paul Valery
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory. ~ Miguel de Unamuno
If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness. ~ Tadao Ando
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. ~ John Updike
I have only the idea I have made of myself to sustain me on oceans of nothingness. ~ Henry De Montherlant
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it. ~ Andy Warhol
A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too. ~ P. J. O’Rourke
If all great minds thought alike, we’d be stuck in perpetual nothingness. ~ Josh Holman
I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about. ~ Oscar Wilde
Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine. ~ Fran Lebowitz
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Meditation hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ’cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the universe, you’re linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you’re content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there’s the only place to be. ~ Bobby Case
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness. If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don’t talk about it, no one knows it is there. ~ Robert M. Pirsig
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. ~ Charles Darwin
I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road. ~ Stephen Hawking
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. ~ Woody Allen
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that – events beyond the will of the gods – and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility. ~ Steven Erikson
When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I’d watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being. ~ Jerry Hall
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing. ~ Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off. ~ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss ~ Sigmund Freud
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
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
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. ~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves
To do nothing is the way to be nothing. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Just Above Sunset 