Quotes on Empty

People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.

If I could give you only one advice, I would say: Don't identify with anything. Be completely empty - no one. Be no-body and see if you lose anything but delusion.

Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.

He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books...The books were the closest thing he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

A woman I loved [Andi Parhamovich] was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 – al-Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it … The memorial service with me crying over an empty coffin.

Read yourself, not books. Truth isn't outside, that's only memory, not wisdom. Memory without wisdom is like an empty thermos bottle - if you don't fill it, it's useless.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book?

The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.

Meditation means this opening out of the soul to the Divine and letting the Divine shine in without obstruction from the personal self. Therefore it means renunciation. It means throwing away everything that one has, and waiting empty for the light to come in.

Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.

A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, ‘Where have they taken Him?’

Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent. But perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.

It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life...He urges me to learn of Him: 'I am gentle and humble in heart.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)

To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

I think a person has to believe in something,_x000D_ or search out some kind of faith;_x000D_ otherwise life is empty, nothing._x000D_ How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,_x000D_ why children are born, why there are stars in the sky..._x000D_ Either you know why you live,_x000D_ or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

I was fine being in the closet at the beginning of my career because that's what you were supposed to be - until I realized that it didn't serve anybody, and I was left feeling utterly empty. This is who I am, so I've gotta be me.

I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.