Quotes about Emptiness

Who can free himself from achievement And from fame, descend and be lost Amid the masses of men? He will flow like Tao, unseen, He will go about like Life itself With no name and no home. Simple is he, without distinction. To all appearances he is a fool. His steps leave no trace. He has no power. He achieves nothing, has no reputation. Since he judges no one No one judges him. Such is the perfect man: His boat is empty.

It was in this year, too, that the hard crust of my dry soul finally squeezed out all the last traces of religion that had ever been in it. There was no room for any God in that empty temple full of dust and rubbish which I was now so jealously to guard against all intruders, in order to devote it to the worship of my own stupid will.

ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.

Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery.

What a strange thing! In filling myself I had emptied myself

The contemplative way is, in fact, not a way. Christ alone is the way, and he is invisible. The 'desert' of contemplation is simply a metaphor to explain the state of emptiness which we experience when we have left all ways, forgotten ourselves and taken the invisible Christ as our way.

All those days and nights were without romance, horrible.

My heart is broken, he told himself. It was at that moment he understood the profound meaning of that common phrase: he thought he heard the sound of glass breaking and felt that the essence of his being was pouring out until he was empty, with no memory of the past, no awareness of the present, no hope for the future.

She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don't hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember.

I felt like I'd been emptied out from the inside, I was a bloody cavity, I couldn't breathe, my bones were made of wax, my soul had taken flight. And the world still turned as if nothing had happened: I stand up, take one step then another, find my voice and respond, I haven't lost my mind, I drink water, my mouth full of sand, my eyes burning, and my little girl stiff, frozen, sculpted in alabaster

The void can only be filled with love.

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.