#nothingness

And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber. ↗

— James Agee

#infinity #nothingness #age

All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't. . . ↗

— Ayn Rand

#collectives #committees #incompetency #nothingness #men

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

— Pope John XXIII

#company #feelings #good #good company #kept

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

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#dath #nothingness #death

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? ↗

— Thomas Mann

#eternity #excellence #nothingness #perfection #sea

I know there's no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything. ↗

— Drew Magary

#dying #nothingness #death

Absolute equals nothingness. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #equals #literature #literature-quotes #nothingness

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#life #nothingness #life