#nothingness

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#became #god #him #i #less

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#helps #into #joy #neither #nor

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#death #deaths #differ #even #lives

The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company. ↗

— Pope John XXIII

#company #feelings #good #good company #kept

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history. ↗

— Lew Wallace

#against #death #history #inscriptions #monuments

Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?” “Basically.” “Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#nothingness #reincarnation #imagination

How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance ↗

— Robert Walser

#life #nothingness #robert-walser #silence #tired

And in the livid night there creeps a basilisk, spawned by the moon after its strange fashion. The moon – eternally barren - is its father, but its mother is the sand, barren likewise: this is the mystery of the desert. Many say that it is an animal, but this is not so, it is a thought, growing there where there is no earth and no seed: a thought which sprang from that which is eternally barren, and now assumes strange forms which life does not know. This is the reason that no one can describe this being, because it is like nothingness, indescribable. ↗

— Hanns Heinz Ewers

#monster #nothingness #life

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. ↗

— John Keats

#forever #increases #into #joy #loveliness

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#nothingness #dreams