Quotes about nothing
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“Place nothing above the verdict of your own mind.”
“All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.”
"Physics and Reality" in the Journal of the Franklin Institute Vol. 221, Issue 3 (March 1936)
Variant translation: "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." As it appears in the "Physics and Reality" section of the book "Out of My Later Years" by Albert Einstein (1950)
1930s
“Nothing … will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.”
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 6
“There is nothing frightening in the dark if you just face it.”
Source: The Captive Part II / The Power
Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Letter to Besso's family (March 1955) following the death of Michele Besso, as quoted in Disturbing the Universe (1979) by Freeman Dyson Ch. 17 "A Distant Mirror", p. 193
Sometimes misquoted as "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
1950s
Variant: "He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion." Quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson (2008), p. 540 http://books.google.com/books?id=cdxWNE7NY6QC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA540#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Variant: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Quoted in Albert Einstein: The Miracle Mind by Tabatha Yeatts (2007), p. 116 http://books.google.com/books?id=XiyyVYvQBKQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT114#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Variant: "In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by a little. That doesn't mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious." Quoted in The Structure of Physics by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1985), p. 288 http://books.google.com/books?id=DeexONN0zDgC&lpg=PR2&pg=PA288#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Variant: "Now he has departed a little ahead of me from this quaint world. This means nothing. For us faithful physicists, the separation between past, present, and future has only the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one." Quoted in Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer (2002), p. 161 http://books.google.com/books?id=TnCc1f1C25IC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA161#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Variant: "Now he has preceded me by a little bit in his departure from this strange world as well. This means nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious this illusion may be." Quoted in Einstein: A Biography by Jürgen Neff (2007), p. 402 http://books.google.com/books?id=B8K6n177ZwcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA402#v=onepage&q&f=false
Source: Always and Forever, Lara Jean
“Nothing, no one, is too small to matter. What you do is going to make a difference.”
Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
“Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to…”
Source: The Red Tree
“And I closed my eyes because I wanted to know nothing but her arms.”
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.”
Variant: Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.
Source: Invisible Monsters
“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”
“Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.”
Source: The Stone Gods
“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.”
Source: The Immoralist
“Failure is not having the courage to try, nothing more an nothing less.”
Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams Reaching Your Destiny
“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”
“Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.”
Source: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor
“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”
Source: How to Be Both
Source: Sense and Sensibility
“If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.”
“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”
Source: Beim nächsten Mann wird alles anders
Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community
The First Revelation, Chapter 5
Context: Also our Lord God shewed that it is full great pleasance to Him that a helpless soul come to Him simply and plainly and homely. For this is the natural yearnings of the soul, by the touching of the Holy Ghost (as by the understanding that I have in this Shewing): God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth, — but only in Thee I have all.
And these words are full lovely to the soul, and full near touch they the will of God and His Goodness. For His Goodness comprehendeth all His creatures and all His blessed works, and overpasseth without end. For He is the endlessness, and He hath made us only to Himself, and restored us by His blessed Passion, and keepeth us in His blessed love; and all this of His Goodness.
“I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”
“Because nothing says flattery like a gun to the head.”
Source: Blood Rites
“Nothing makes sense, why should I?”
Source: Nothing to Lose But Your Life: An 18-Hour Journey With Murad
“Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
“Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.”
As "Trudy"
Contributions of Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)
Source: The Sound of the Mountain
“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility”
Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
“Nothing is so hard that it can't be found by searching.”
Source: White Witch, Black Curse
which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next — one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)
“There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.”
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.”
Source: And the Mountains Echoed
Ham On Rye (1982)
Source: Ham on Rye
Context: And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher.
“We know there's going to be nothing but pain, but we go back again and again.”
Source: The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
“There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”
According to The quote verifier: who said what, where, and when (2006), Keyes, Macmillan, p. 91 ISBN 0312340044 , the cover of a trade magazine once credited this observation to Churchill, but it dates back well into the nineteenth century, and has been variously attributed to Henry Ward Beecher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, w:Theodore Roosevelt, w:Thomas Jefferson, w:Will Rogers and Lord Palmerston, among others. One documented use in Social Silhouettes (1906) by George William Erskine Russell, p. 218 wherein a character attributes the saying to Lord Palmerston.
Misattributed
“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”
“Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.”
Source: Summerland
“Then I choose to drown. In hope. Rather than float into nothing.”
Source: Finnikin of the Rock