Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1967 [1965])
“A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.”
New York Times (October 9, 1985)
Whilst composing Also Sprach Zarthustra, Strauss made this joke about the Bavaria weather to his friend, the conductor Max von Schillings. Quoted in Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss - an intimate portrait, page 73.
Other sources
“The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing.”
As quoted by Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!
Last Mango in Paris
Song lyrics, Last Mango in Paris (1985)
“Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.”
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV, 4
