Non Being Quotes

#1. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.

Ian McEwan

#2. The named was born from the unnamed ... all being flows from non-being ... the describable world emanates from an indescribable source.

Laozi

#3. When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.

Ingmar Bergman

#4. When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.

Jack Kerouac

#5. The universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

Paul Valery

#6. Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#7. Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy.

Lao-Tzu

#8. Many aspects of life cannot be explained through logic or reason. The reasoning part of the mind simply doesn't have the capacity to understand the many whys and how's of being and non-being.

Frederick Lenz

#9. I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

Jacques Lacan

#10. The bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this relation can not be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own nothingness of being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#11. We cut up time and space and mind and place and being and non-being. We create a world of ideas. This is duality, pairs of apparent opposites.

Frederick Lenz

#12. To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something [the Reality] beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of Pure Awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

#13. As a free person I can always come and go, Not caught in ideas of is and is not. Not caught in ideas of being and non-being Let your steps be leisurely.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#14. Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

Michel Foucault

#15. The deepest realization of meditation is that your being is a non-being. It is a nothing, a vast emptiness without boundaries. It is a no-self. The feeling of self, of "I" is false.

Swami Dhyan Giten

#16. When to the Permanent is sacrificed the Mutable, the prize is thine: the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the changeless change - Non-Being, the glorious state of Absoluteness, the Bliss past human thought.

Alexander Pope

#17. To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.

Athol Fugard

#18. Earth, mountains, rivers, hidden in this nothingness.
In this nothingness, earth, mountains, rivers revealed.
Spring flowers, winter snows.
There's no being or non-being, nor denial itself.

Saisho Hiroshi

#19. Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

Gottfried Leibniz

#20. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of non-being. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.

Paul Tillich

#21. All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Lao-Tzu

#22. Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.

Horace

#23. What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness
that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.

Vladimir Nabokov

#24. If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being.

Chloe Thurlow

#25. Artists do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.

Rollo May

#26. Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.

Laozi

#27. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.

Athanasius Of Alexandria

#28. How easy it was to capitalize on a person's own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Robert Galbraith

#29. There are five things which no one is able to accomplish in this world: first, to cease growing old when he is growing old; second, to cease being sick; third, to cease dying; fourth, to deny dissolution when there is dissolution; fifth, to deny non-being.

Gautama Buddha

#30. The Void is a living void ... pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. The great Void does not exist as Void, it embraces all Being/non-Being

Frederick Franck

#31. Their [the new atheists] treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing.

Michael Ruse

#32. We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#33. The stranger's way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being - belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition.

Paul Valery

#34. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

George Steiner

#35. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.

D.H. Lawrence

#36. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

Paul Tillich

#37. Thirty spokes share one hub in non-being lies the use of the cart knead clay to make vessels in non-being lies the use of the vessel cut out doors and windows to make a house
therefore form being comes what is usable and from non-being comes what is essential.

Lao-Tzu

#38. So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

Nan Shepherd

#39. All things in the world are born out of being. Being is born out of non-being.

Laozi

#40. In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.

Camille Paglia

#41. To be or not to be, that is not a question, because reality transcends both notions of birth and death, of being and non-being.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#42. Empty orators and silent scholars
died without having understood Being and non-Being.
Ignorants, my brothers, let us continue tasting
the juice of the grape attentively and let
the authorities satisfy themselves
with dry raisins.

Omar Khayyam

#43. What is the mirror of Being? Non-being. Bring non-being as your gift, if you are not a fool.

Rumi

#44. And getting licked by someone furry wasn't threatening but being kissed by the non furred male was, which made sense when the furry and non furred were the same person. Wolf.

Anne Bishop

#45. Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no Willpower not to do so.

Allen Carr

#46. I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself

Ruth Ahmed

#47. My only non-acting job was being a barista at Coffee Bean. While I was in college, and I had a blast! I loved making drinks because I got to be like a mad scientist.

Troian Bellisario

#48. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.

Anthony Holden

#49. Refraining from harm, not out of fear, but out of concern for others, their well-being and out of respect is non-violence.

Dalai Lama

#50. I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

Andrew Sullivan

#51. To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.

Thomas Sowell

#52. To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.

Sharon Salzberg

#53. The double jeopardy of being black and female in a racist and sexist society may well make one less afraid of the sanctions against success. A non-subservient black woman is by definition a transgressive- she is the ultimate outsider.

Mamphela Ramphele

#54. I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story.

Patrick Rothfuss

#55. There is no mystery about my style. My movements are simple, direct and non-classical. The extraordinary part of it lies in its simplicity. Every movement in Jeet Kune-Do is being so of itself. There is nothing artificial about it. I always believe that the easy way is the right way.

Bruce Lee

#56. Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.

Emma Goldman

#57. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Will Self

#58. My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.

Peter C. Doherty

#59. That's what being a leader is all about. If the other players see you in a non-positive mind set, that affects them. I have to present an air of confidence at all times.

Joey Harrington

#60. Usually a fiber, after being dipped in a liquid, shows a string of droplets, and thus, for some time, people thought that most common fibers were non-wettable.

Pierre-Gilles De Gennes

#61. Nonviolence aims at doing no harm to living being. Compassion aims at doing good to all being.

Amit Ray

#62. The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Walter Kirn

#63. Being a non-swimmer, I've never been excited by the sea so avoid it on holidays.

Donald Sinden

#64. The power of declaring war being with the Legislature, the Executive should do nothing necessarily committing them to decide for war in preference of non-intercourse, which will be preferred by a great many.

Thomas Jefferson

#65. I'm not sure if being Chinese really helped, but I do think that if a non-Asian had written a book called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' they might not have been looked upon so kindly.

Kevin Kwan

#66. The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength. Inevitably,

David Lodge

#67. In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism.

Paula Gunn Allen

#68. Being insulted offers you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.

Bryant McGill

#69. Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.

Yuri Milner

#70. Perhaps you couldn't help being angry... but you could certainly stop yourself from repaying one offense with another.

Gail Carson Levine

#71. Non-attachment is about not being attached to anything - including non-attachment itself.

Peter Merry

#72. The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.

Robert Musil

#73. The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment; avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present; and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping.

Sharon Salzberg

#74. Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

Mahatma Gandhi

#75. Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.

Ethan Coen

#76. I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.

Carol Moseley Braun

#77. I just think that the question of women in rock or women playing guitar, I just think it's such a non-issue, and I think that probably the sooner critics and press outlets can just erase the 'what's it like being a women in rock?' question from their vocabulary, the better off everyone will be.

Annie E. Clark

#78. Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.

Richard Rohr

#79. Being from a minority culture, I realised the importance of looking at non-Western cultures in a positive way.

Ibn Warraq

#80. Last time I went Intercity there were a couple across the aisle having sex. Of course, this being a British train, nobody said anything. Then they finished, they both lit up a cigarette and this woman stood up and said, Excuse me, I think you'll find this is a non-smoking compartment.

Victoria Wood

#81. Force that the performance of duty naturally generates is the non-violent and invincible force that satyagraha brings into being.

Mahatma Gandhi

#82. If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

Thomas Huxley

#83. Meditation means to be in non-doing. Meditation is not a doing but a state of being. It is a state of being in one's own self.

Rajneesh

#84. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?

Darin Strauss

#85. If you pursue meditation with a non-competitive attitude, with a hopeful and helpful attitude, without violence, then you will find that you will become a very benign and powerful being, one who is at peace with himself and the universe.

Frederick Lenz

#86. Linde's Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting.

Tanya Luhrmann

#87. Not violence, nor untruth but non-violence and Truth are the laws of our being.

Mahatma Gandhi

#88. Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers ... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.

Derek Bok

#89. Nothing is more violent and radical than what's being done to non-human animals in our society. If a researcher won't stop abusing animals and is stopped physically, whether with the use of force, or is killed, I certainly wouldn't lose sleep over that idea.

Jerry Vlasak

#90. Tobak Davenport, who is a cross between some Sugar Puffs and Lynn Faulds-Wood, was squatting there before being removed by the local constabulary after he went round to complain about Luther Blisset's pet turkey fouling the communal herb garden.

St John Morris

#91. I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.

Melissa Peterman

#92. In the application of the method of non-violence, one must believe in the possibility of every person, however depraved, being reformed under humane and skilled treatment.

Mahatma Gandhi

#93. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It's a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.

Joseph Campbell

#94. The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22

Thomas Merton

#95. Being a parent means my time use has to be a bit more focused, but it also gives me a new non-writing dimension to my life, which is a healthy thing. I can't wander along for weeks with an idea drifting through my head - I have someone who will drag me back into life, and that's a good thing.

Nick Earls

#96. We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory.

Idries Shah

#97. You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.

Yukio Mishima

#98. The theme that runs through all my books is connection. Connection - physical and non-physical - with other humans, and connection with nature are necessary for our well-being. Without it, we are depressed, lonely, and fail to thrive.

Mary Alice Monroe

#99. Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."

Sherman Alexie

#100. Being the only non-Black was a unique experience. After a few weeks, you're not aware of skin color differences. You see the color; you're not blind, but it doesn't matter. You see the human being first.

Ricardo Montalban