God's Silence

When we meditate, when we center ourselves,
when we embrace that place, our godling,
our higher self, there in the emptiness
we find the love within God's silence.

Glenn Buttkus

Loving can cost a lot but not loving
always costs more, and those who fear
to love often find that want of love
is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

Merle Shain

Our greatest pretenses are built up
not to hide the evil and the ugly in us,
but our emptiness. The hardest thing
to hide is something that is not there.

Eric Hoffer

Once conform, once do what other people do
because they do it, and a lethargy steals
over all the finer nerves and faculties
of the soul. She becomes all outer show
and inward emptiness; dull, callous,
and indifferent.”

Virginia Woolf

Man finds nothing so intolerable as
to be in a state of complete rest,
without passions, without occupation,
without diversion, without effort.
Then he feels his nullity, loneliness,
inadequacy, dependence, helplessness,
emptiness.

Blaise Pascal

Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling
all the way.

Alexander Pope

One's condition on marijuana is always
existential. One can feel the importance
of each moment and how it is changing one.
One feels one's being, one becomes aware
of the enormous apparatus of nothingness --
the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness
of a pointless interruption, one becomes
aware of the war between each of us,
how the nothingness in each of us seeks
to attack the being of others,
how our being in turn is attacked by
the nothingness in others.

Norman Mailer

We cannot let another person into our hearts
or minds unless we empty ourselves.
We can truly listen to him
or truly hear her only out of emptiness.

M. Scott Peck

Smile and others will smile back.
Smile to show how transparent,
how candid you are. Smile if you have
nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide
the fact you have nothing to say nor
your total indifference to others.
Let this emptiness, this profound
indifference shine out spontaneously
in your smile.

Jean Baudrillard

***Sounds like something Doug Palmer might say, or has said.

The beginning of love is a horror
of emptiness

Robert Bly

Emptiness is only a disguise for an
intimacy of God's, that God's silence,
the eerie stillness, is filled by
the Word without words,
by Him who is above all names,
by Him who is all in all.
And his silence is telling us that
He is here.

Karl Rahner

There was emptiness more profound
than the void between the stars,
for which there was no here and there
and before and after, and yet out of
that void the entire plenum of existence
sprang forth.

Heinz R. Pagels

His whole future seemed suddenly to be
unrolled before him; and passing down
its endless emptiness he saw
the dwindling figure of a man
to whom nothing was ever to happen.

Edith Wharton

Human affairs are like a chess-game:
only those who do not take it seriously
can be called good players.
Life is like an earthen pot:
only when it is shattered,
does it manifest its emptiness.

Seneca

In very truth the days are almost free,
and if it is another way of saying that
our lives are empty, well -- there are
days when emptiness is spacious,
and non-existence elevating . . .

Florida Scott Maxwell

You've been gone so long from all that
you know. It's been shuffled aside as
you bask in the glow. All the beauitful
strangers who whisper your name,
do they fill up the emptiness?
Larger that life is your fiction,
in a universe made upon one.

Sarah McLachlan

We are all prone to the malady of
the introvert who, with the manifold
spectacle of the world spread out
before him, turns away and gazes only
upon the emptiness within. But let us
not imagine there is anything grand
about the introvert's unhappiness.

Bertrand Russell

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.

Helen Keller

Boredom is an emptiness filled
with insistence.

Leo Stein

One cannot long remain so absorbed in
contemplation of emptiness without
being increasingly attracted to it.
In vain one bestows on it the name
of infinity; this does not change
its nature. When one feels such pleasure
in non-existence, one's inclination can
be completely satisfied only by completely
ceasing to exist.

Emile Durkheim

When one begins to purposefully perform
acts of kindness, the spirit changes
and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal
point for our life; doing good begins to
be the same as feeling good. The periods
of emptiness when we search for the
"meaning of it all" begin to fill with
acts of kindness.

Gary Ryan Blair

There’s no emptiness in the life
of a warrior. Everything is filled
to the brim, and everything is equal.

Carlos Castaneda

Men's need to dominate women may be
based in their own sense of marginality
or emptiness; we do not know its root,
and men are making no effort to discover it

Marilyn French

A man who keeps a diary pays,
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful - then,
His busy hand forgets the pen.
Most books, indeed, are records less
Of fulness than of emptiness.

William Allingham

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them
but tittering jeering emptiness. They have
all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . .
The shallowest people on the ridge
of the earth.

William Butler Yeats

The usefulness of a cup
is in its emptiness.

Old Chinese Proverb

Religion is the dream of the human mind.
But even in dreams we do not find
ourselves in emptiness or in heaven,
but on earth, in the realm of reality;
we only see real things in the entrancing
splendor of imagination and caprice,
instead of in the simple daylight of reality
and necessity.

Ludwig Feuerbach

To fake it is to stand guard
over emptiness”

Arthur Herzog

It's a great excuse and luxury, having
a job and blaming it for your inability
to do your own art. When you don't have
to work, you are left with the horror
of facing your own lack of imagination
and your own emptiness. A devastating
possibility when finally time is your own.

Julian Schnabel

Bowed by the weight of centuries
he leans upon his hoe and gazes on
the ground, the emptiness of ages
in his face, and on his back
the burden of the world.

Edwin Markham

Dean took out other pictures. I realized
these were all the snapshots which our
children would look at someday with wonder,
thinking their parents had lived smooth,
well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo
lives and got up in the morning to walk
proudly on the sidewalks of life,
never dreaming the raggedy madness
and riot of our actual lives, our actual
night, the hell of it, the senseless
nightmare road. All of it inside endless
and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms
of ignorance.

Jack Kerouac

All the little emptiness of love

Rupert Brooke

I can't believe what has happened, but
that's life. We were really quick in
practice and the morning's warm-up
and I was ecstatic with the starts
to both races. There's just that
feeling of emptiness that we were
wrongly deprived of a significant advantage.

Matt Halliday

From “no thing”, movement arises naturally.
From inaction, comes action.
From emptiness, comes shape and form.
And from stillness, comes energy and flow.

Gabriella Goddard

It's just this epidemic unimportance,
this pervasive feeling that just about
everything is "no big deal," that drives
these ordinary people to those fast-food
joints, there to try to fill with
carbohydrates the spiritual and emotional
emptiness gnawing inside them.

Ron Loewinsohn

It's the most devastating feeling I've
ever felt. It's just an emptiness inside
you that only time will heal, I guess.
We came so close.

Brandon Worthy

It's the toughest challenge of my life
because football is all I know.
It's all I want to do. That's it,
and when that gets taken away from you
that hurts more than anything.
There's an emptiness. ... I've got to
stay positive. I'm not going to lie to you.
I'm down in spirits right now.

Gary Baxter

I've got this emptiness in my heart
and it will never be fulfilled again,
and I just lost the most important
person in my life.

Linda McDonald

I wonder if anyone will ever know
the emptiness of my life. Personal Diary --
Last entry "Oh what's the point?"

Kenneth Williams

It feels awesome to have him home.
There was an emptiness while he was gone.

Tina Brown

I think about that "empty" space a lot.
That emptiness is what allows for something
to actually evolve in a natural way.
I've had to learn that over the years -
because one of the traps of being
an artist is to always want to be creating,
always wanting to produce.

Meredith Monk

I think everybody did the right thing.
But there's still an emptiness there.
The moment of winning was lost, and this
doesn't bring it back. Nothing will.

Rick Ellison

The elephant in the living room for us
is the huge number of seats and the
emptiness for great concerts. ...
The symphony has to look out for itself.
That's what we the trustees are there for.
Right now, our first line of defense
is a renovation with reduction of seating.

Rick Reynolds

The only thing that can replace
(the emptiness) is a new sense
of community. It's more than the sum
of the individual losses.

Stephanie Coontz

There's an incredible feeling of emptiness
and missed opportunity.

Paul Allen

I have a hard time feeling really sad
or upset about the game. What I'm going to
feel in a couple of hours is an emptiness
because it's over.

Ed Feller

No amount of justice could bring them back
or replace the emptiness I feel, but I'm
glad he's off the streets. My girls are gone
forever; they can't be a teacher or a
lawyer like two of them dreamed of.

Marina Daniels

To know That which before us lies in daily
life, Is the prime Wisdom; what is more,
is fume, Or emptiness, or fond impertinence

John Milton

So from that standpoint, it didn't seem
weird to me at all. I think it's interesting
and obviously audiences do, too ... I think
there is a sort of emptiness in our look at
life in general lately, and think this is a
way to explore that.

Anne Archer

Terri's death brings to a close a very
tragic, human and personal event that has
left everyone with a feeling of emptiness,
regardless of what side of the issue
you may have been on.

Bob Beauprez

You think as time goes by, it'll get better, ...
But it's just emptiness and sadness.
Thank God I'm a religious person.
And there better be a heaven, because
I do a lot of talking to my son up there.

William Shea

We are presenting the emptiness
and mourning the Holocaust left behind.

Judith Molnar

We for a certainty are not the first to
have sat in taverns while the tempest
hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness,
and cursed whatever brute and blackguard
made the world.

A. E. Housman

We played the way I think we should be
playing all the time. I thought our guys
were into the game. I thought our guys
had some energy out there for long periods
of time. Where there's an emptiness in
our gut because we didn't get the win,
I can live with that fact that we're not
quite good enough, but we played to the best
of our ability.

Melvin Watkins

What I was trying to convey there was
the kind of waste land that was left after
the war. It was a bit like one always thinks
of war, you know, stark scenery and no birds,
no trees, no leaves, nothing living.
And just emptiness.

George Martin

When mind soars in pursuit of the things
conceived in space, it pursues emptiness.
When man dives deep within himself, he
experiences the fullness of existence.

Avatar Meher Baba

Epilogue:

There is a stillness
On the tops of the hills.
In the tree tops
You feel
Hardly a breath of air.
The small birds fall silent in the trees.
Simply wait: soon
You too will be silent.–Goethe

Robert Bly writes: “this poem contains an
experience many people have had:
each time a human being’s desire-energy
leaves his body, and goes out into the hills
or forest, the desire-energy whispers to
the ears as it leaves ‘You know, one day
you will die.’ I think both men and women
need this whisper; it helps the human
to come down, to be on the ground.
When that whisper comes, it means that
the tree-consciousness, the one
in the wooded hill, and the one in man,
have spoken to each other. …”