Quotes on Emptiness

How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?

What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

It's so dreadful to have nothing to love - life is so empty - and there's nothing worse than emptiness.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

We become aware of the void as we fill it.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.