Quotes About Nothingness And Being

#1. 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

#2. He had always thought that death was black nothingness, but he had not counted on being awake for it.

Kay Kenyon

#3. So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

Charles Bukowski

#4. When there is nothing to catch
And nothing is catching you,
You are free;

From all your separations!

Sayantan Sen

#5. I use the terms "sky" and "earth" because as a human I cannot imagine those elements not being there. It is a way to give substance to nothingness.

Mark Tufo

#6. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#7. Nothingness haunts Being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#8. After the deep, warm nothingness, there was no pleasure in recalling who he was. Without coming fully awake, he nonetheless felt the weight of his own being settling on his heart. Despair and anger and the constant gnawing worry sounded in his mind like a man in the next room clearing his throat.

George R R Martin

#9. She had known that being with Clay would be good, that it would eclipse the other times into nothingness, but this was beyond good, beyond anything. All she could think was - no wonder women liked sex. But of course, this was nothing so simple as sex. This was ... Oh, man.

Nalini Singh

#10. Home is where you can go and rest and be nothing

Marty Rubin

#11. Isolation and belonging are not absolute, provable states of being. They arise completely out of the nothingness within you; you measure their dimensions against your own firm or shaky sense of who you are.

Paula Sharp

#12. I am no longer surprised by anything and I feel no distress at seeing my complete helplessness. On the contrary, I glory in it and every day I expect to discover fresh flaws in myself. In fact, this revelation of my nothingness does me much more good than being enlightened on matters of faith.

John Beevers

#13. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#14. All he had was *being* as a soap bubble: an iridescent wonder, holding so much but for such a short time, always one plink from nothingness, one plink from surrendering volume to the sky".

Will Chancellor

#15. Before man ventures into daydreams about his futuristic society, he should
first immerse himself in the nothingness of his being, and finally restore life to what it is all about: a working hypothesis.

Tomislav Sunic

#16. Among the great things which are to be found among us, the being of nothingness is the greatest.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#17. This happened not once, but twice - first with Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.)

Christopher Panza

#18. I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

Emil Cioran

#19. Jesus.. says, 'Let go of your complaints, forgive those who loved you poorly, step over your feelings of being rejected, and have the courage to trust that you won't fall into an abyss of nothingness but into the safe embrace of a God whose love will heal all your wounds.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#20. LifeParticles are the particles of Nothingness that have attributes of being and nonbeing, and the particles of energy and consciousness, which are the essence of Life.

Ilchi Lee

#21. [ ... ][I]f you adapted too much in order to deal with them, you ran the risk of forgetting who you were and you could end up being neither and nothing.

Anne Bishop

#22. Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#23. Nothingness not being nothing, nothingness being emptiness.

Isabelle Adjani

#24. 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

#25. Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

William Barrett

#26. Being and Nothingness by Sartre.

E. Lockhart

#27. Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.

Donna Tartt

#28. Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

Heinz Pagels

#29. The last thing he felt was Bethany being pulled from his limp arms. A finality of black crashed over him in waves he couldn't surface from, welcoming him into the nothingness that dug in deep, refusing to ever let him go.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#30. I don't know if once you die you remember things that happened to you when you were alive. It makes a certain logical sense that you wouldn't. That being dead will feel like before you were born, which is to say, a whole lot of nothingness.

Gayle Forman

#31. 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

#32. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

Peter Ackroyd

#33. Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

Jim Holt

#34. and the idea of nothingness - the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling - has, in my dear master's work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.

Alvaro De Campos

#35. That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause.

Harvey Mansfield

#36. With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#37. The Lord of life and love calls us out of nothingness into being, calls us out of darkness into light, and calls us, personally, to turn and begin our lives anew in him.

Malcolm Guite

#38. Movements never quite exist, they are passages, intermediaries between two existences, moments of weakness, I expected to see them come out of nothingness, progressively ripen, blossom: I was finally going to surprise beings in the process of being born.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#39. The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Guy Davenport

#40. 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

#41. The true asset before any human being on this planet are... Enthusiasm & Will... with these everything comes from nothingness & devoid of them everything perishes to nothingness...

Dinesh Kumar

#42. You see what the word of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

Joan Didion

#43. 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

#44. What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

Richard Wright

#45. Recalibration comes from experiencing Nothingness, being open to emptiness as the ultimate reality and our nature. It is the purest mind, the Energy-Consciousness itself.

Ilchi Lee

#46. A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Margaret Atwood

#47. The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth.

Thomas Merton