“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Source: Tears and Saints (1937)
From "Life" in Unspoken Sermons Series II (1886)
Context: "In the midst of life we are in death," said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow — a word for that which cannot be — a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.
“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Source: Tears and Saints (1937)
James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)
From a letter dated 19 October 1879, quoted by Bertram Dobell in The Laureate of Pessimism: A Sketch of the Life, and Character of James Thomson ("BV"); Author of the City of Dreadful Night (1910), p. 38
“Even a minute of dying is better than an eternity of nothingness.”
Darren Shan book Sons of Destiny
Source: Sons of Destiny
Tetto Giko (1295–1369)
Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher
Source: The Way Towards The Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion 1806, P. 4
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
“Stop allowing your day-to-day life to be clouded by busy nothingness.”
Steve Maraboli (1975)
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 116
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon
Source: Flowers for Algernon (1966)