Quotes about void
page 3

“The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: (1940), V

Past, Heart

“An act against the Constitution is void; an act against natural equity is void.”

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) Lawyer in colonial Massachusetts

Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)

Nature

“You win in battles with the timing in the Void born of the timing of cunning by knowing the enemies' timing, and this using a timing which the enemy does not expect.
All the five books are chiefly concerned with timing. You must train sufficiently to appreciate all this.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Ground Book

Books, Time, Training

“I sat before my typewriter and the great awful void descended, and I beat my head with my fists, put a pillow under my aching buttocks and made little noises of agony.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"The least said about Lib Dems, the better", Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2003, p. 24.
2000s, 2003

“It is also not entirely unworthy of observation, that in declaring what shall be the supreme law of the land, the constitution itself is first mentioned; and not the laws of the United States generally, but those only which shall be made in pursuance of the constitution, have that rank. Thus, the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 180
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Law

“Music would probably go. A lot of art would. That’s what I’m saying – I’m really into comics and movies and video games, and I don’t want to give that stuff up. At the same time, I think it’s filling the void for the stuff we’re missing.”

Andrew Hurley (1980) American musician

On if rock bands would ruin civilization
The Boys With the Car-Crash Hearts (March 8, 2007)

Art, Music, Game, Thinking

“There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Review of the book My Hope for America
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

Life, Fear, Way, Democracy

“California is a queer place — in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter (September 24, 1923); published in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton, E. Mansfield, and W. Roberts (1987), vol. 4.

World, Way, Effort, Falseness

“There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

Lying

“These Peripatetics accordingly made careful investigations into the nature of all things, so as to determine which I should be avoided as evil, discounted as useless, sought after as good, or preferred as better, and finally which are called "good" or "bad" according to circumstances. There thus developed two branches of philosophy, natural and moral, which are also called ethics and physics. But, through lack of scientific skill in argumentative reasoning, many absurdities were concluded. Thus Epicurus would have the world originate from atoms and a void, and would dispense with God as its author; whereas the Stoics asserted that matter is coeternal with God, and held that all sins are equally grave. p. 76”

John of Salisbury English philosopher and theologian

The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury (1159)

God, World, Nature, Evil

“Writing should never be allowed to become a substitute for living. Style cannot breath in a void. It should not be forgotten that Dickens was at one time a reporter, Balzac a lawyer's clerk and Tchekov a county doctor. Art is different from life but cannot exist without it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, Art, Time

“If one would a It is impossible for us in words to describe the ineffable dignity of the soul and we cannot in any way comprehend it prepare an empty place in the depths of the soul
there can be no doubt that God must fill it at once.
If there were a void on earth the heaven would fall to fill it….”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons

God, Way, Soul

“The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 20 (p. 168)

Disease, Lying

“Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void, or is it merely my own desire?”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (p. 123)

“If states themselves are less able to handle various responsibilities, this leaves open the possibility of the emergence of some form of global governance to fill the void.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 6, Global Political Structures and Processes, p. 157

“He [Pericles] reduced the power of the Council of the Areopagus, a group of feeble old men who held their jobs for life and whose duty it was to declare everything null and void… [Footnote] He also revoked their right to censor the private lives of the citizens. This was nasty of Pericles, for about the only pleasure the old fellows had was catching some citizen doing what he shouldn't. After that, they had to use their imaginations.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Pericles

Life, Men, Pleasure, Imagination

“With the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

Falling (l. 9–11).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Cry

“The whole nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician

On Scotland, in a etter to Sir Horace Mann (1778); comparable to "It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding", by Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir, vol. i. p. 15.

“Love Christ, and then the eternity in the heart will not be a great aching void, but will be filled with the everlasting life which Christ gives and is.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 397.

Love, Life, Heart, Christ

“Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects, Other chapters

People, Law, Learning

“Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i. e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible.”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 286

Change

“Many things are said to be passed on. Sleepiness can be passed on, and yawning can be passed on. Time can be passed on also.
In large-scale strategy, when the enemy is agitated and shows an inclination to rush, do not mind in the least. Make a show of complete calmness, and the enemy will be taken by this and will become relaxed. When you see that this spirit has been passed on, you can bring about the enemy's defeat by attacking strongly with a Void spirit.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Time

“As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 221 from Frederick to Voltaire (1777-11-25)

Understanding

“Apart from these three acts, Mr. President, the Court further declared VOID “the use of unprogrammed funds despite the absence of a certification by the National Treasurer that the revenue collections exceeded the revenue targets for non-compliance with the conditions provided in the relevant GAA.””

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“The Void is a living void
… pulsating in endless rhythms of creation
and destruction. The great Void does not
exist as Void, it embraces all
Being/non-Being”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 63

“We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book I, Ch. 25
Attributed

Understanding, Memory

“Freemasons, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucius, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Secret, Time, Success, Past

“I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 160

“When men have been deprived of faith and have been taught to hate work, so that they see it as an unbearable burden which provides illicit gain for crooked exploiters, then nothing is left but to go into the squares and shout the inner void which devours them, until they look like lost souls. Man reduced to a mere passage for food faces despair as soon as food becomes scarce or tasteless.”

Aldo Palazzeschi book Roma

Page 53, "Checco".
Roma (1953)

Men, Hate, Faith, Food

“Prior to all overturns of XX century, without an exception, Russian opposition has accused authorities in "transferring funds to abroad". And in all cases in turned out to be void propaganda — from 1914-1917 to 1991. And money were transferred later, after the revolution, under brands of "people's power" and "won democracy". The only real way of plundering through "transfer of funds" is change of political system, which would transform into zeroing of all governmental promissory notes. As soon as Russia will become "Other Russia", all the property will turn out to be transferred, "nobody's". And people will be informed, that "previous power has eaten all".”

Gleb Pavlovsky (1951) Russian political scientist

Money, People, Way, Democracy

“In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.”

Roy Blount Jr. (1941) American writer

Long Time Leaving (2007).

“We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events — in short the "consolations" which are ordinarily sought in religion.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Detachment (1947), p. 258

Religion

“Be not afraid to swear. Null and void are the perjuries of love; the winds bear them ineffective over land and the face of the sea. Great thanks to Jove! The Sire himself has decreed no oath should stand that love has taken in the folly of desire.”
Nec iurare time: veneris periuria venti inrita per terras et freta summa ferunt. gratia magna Iovi: vetuit Pater ipse valere, iurasset cupide quidquid ineptus amor.

Tibullus (-50–-19 BC) poet and writer (0054-0019)

Nec iurare time: veneris periuria venti
inrita per terras et freta summa ferunt.
gratia magna Iovi: vetuit Pater ipse valere,
iurasset cupide quidquid ineptus amor.
Bk. 1, no. 4, line 21.
Elegies

Love, Sea

“I am in the void. Nothing to hang on to.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

“[A]ssuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 6

Life, Happiness, Soul, Tear

“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fullfilled only through man's subordination.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For http://books.google.com/books?id=U5ZYAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Anarchism+is+the+only+philosophy+which+brings+to+man+the+consciousness+of+himself+which+maintains+that+God+the+State+and+society+are+non-existent+that+their+promises+are+null+and+void+since+they+can+be+fullfilled+only+through+man's+subordination&quot;&pg=PA58#v=onepage (1910)

God

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

Beauty, Way, Spring, Thinking

“Goddess of woods, tremendous in the chase
To mountain boars, and all the savage race!
Wide o'er the ethereal walks extends thy sway,
And o'er the infernal mansions void of day!
Look upon us on earth! unfold our fate,
And say what region is our destined seat?
Where shall we next thy lasting temples raise?
And choirs of virgins celebrate thy praise?”
Diva potens nemorum terror silvestribus ac spes! Cui licet anfractus ire per ethereos, Infernasque domos terrestria iura resolve. Et dic quas terras nos habitare velis. Dic certam sedem qua te venerabor in euum. Qua tibi virgineis templa dicabo choris.

Geoffrey of Monmouth The History of the Kings of Britain

Diva potens nemorum terror silvestribus ac spes!
</ref>Cui licet anfractus ire per ethereos,
Infernasque domos terrestria iura resolve.
Et dic quas terras nos habitare velis.
Dic certam sedem qua te venerabor in euum.
Qua tibi virgineis templa dicabo choris.
Bk. 1, ch. 11; pp. 100-101.
Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain)

Fate, Mountain

“"Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface'" (Arp). Only love — for painting, in this instance — is able to cover the fearful void.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Robert Motherwell, partly quoting Jean Arp, in Motherwell & black (1981) p. 94 -->
Misattributed

Love, Fear, Drawing, Painting

“The schizophrenic is seen to be afraid of the nihilistic void that … will remain when a rigid world-view is discarded.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

[describing the implications of Ehrenzweig’s theory] p. 95, note
Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

World

“Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Law

“We made up our minds that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution were themselves null and void.”

Benjamin Tillman (1847–1918) American politician

Speech to the U.S. Senate https://web.archive.org/web/20160228073733/http://emancipation.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/emancipation/publication/attachments/A_Republican_Text-Book_for_Colored_Voters.pdf (23 March 1900) 1900s, 1900

“Atlas' grandson obeys his sire's words and hastily thereupon binds the winged sandals on to his ankles and with his wide hat covers his locks and tempers the stars. Then he thrusts the wand in his right hand; with this he was wont to banish sweet slumber or recall it, with this to enter black Tartarus and give life to bloodless phantoms. Down he leapt and shivered as the thin air received him. No pause; he takes swift and lofty flight through the void and traces a vast arc across the clouds.”
Paret Atlantiades dictis genitoris et inde summa pedum propere plantaribus inligat alis obnubitque comas et temperat astra galero. tum dextrae uirgam inseruit, qua pellere dulces aut suadere iterum somnos, qua nigra subire Tartara et exangues animare adsueuerat umbras. desiluit, tenuique exceptus inhorruit aura. nec mora, sublimes raptim per inane volatus carpit et ingenti designat nubila gyro.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 303

Life, Star

“They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?”

Brian W. Aldiss book Outside

Outside (1955)

Men, Behavior, Idea, Thinking

“Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.”

Tariq Ali (1943) British Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian

The Clash of Fundamentalism

“There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2

Future

“When I was quite young… I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality. It seemed to my dim sense of confusion that things often blended one into another, and the Law of Excluded Middle merely opened up a void wherein anything was possible. But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

processes
"Doll Factory, Gun Factory" (1973), essay reprinted in The Maker of Dune : Insights of a Master of Science Fiction (1987), edited by Tim O'Reilly
General sources

Law, Reality, Sense

“We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. In this time we have come to believe that all our major economic ills – from unemployment and poverty to overpopulation and even environmental degradation – can be solved by more growth. And if the global economy existed in a void perhaps that would be true. But it does not.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

Time

“This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 554–561
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Love, World, Spring, Heart

“The void terrifies you, and you open your eyes wider!”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Te asusta el vacío, ¡y abres más los ojos!
Voces (1943)

“I rely on two precedents: first, to similar cases our Sages applied the verse, "It is time to do something in honour of the Lord: for they have made void thy law"… Secondly, they have said, "Let all thy acts be guided by pure intentions."… Lastly, when I have a difficult subject before me—when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools—I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at peace.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Truth, Peace, Law, Fools

“The old theology had few if any fast colors, and it has become very faded and worn under the fierce light and intense activity of our day. Let it go; it is outgrown and outworn. What mankind will finally clothe themselves with to protect them from the chill of the great void, or whether or not they will clothe themselves at all, but become toughened and indifferent, is more than I can pretend to say. For my part, the longer I live the less I feel the need of any sort of theological belief, and the more I am content to let unseen powers go on their way with me and mine without question or distrust. They brought me here, and I have found it well to be here; in due time they will take me hence, and I have no doubt that will be well for me too.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Preface
The Light of Day (1900)

Color, Way, Feeling, Question

“Always the sightseers: open-mouthed, disbelieving. There was a force for desolation loose in their midst which could consume their lives at a glance, surely they could see that? But they’d watch anyway, willing to embrace the void if it came with sufficient razzmatazz.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Part Eleven “The Dream Season”, Chapter v “The Naked Flame”, Section 4 (p. 502)
(1987), BOOK THREE: OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER

“This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe, these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Jealousy, Thinking, Universe, Past

“In an age of democracy and of peaceful or warlike communion among all parts of humanity, philosophy, like poetry and politics, must be prophetic. The content of its prophecy is a vision of how it is that we may respond, right now and with the instruments at hand, to the experience of being lost in a void that is made up of time, into the beginning and end of which we cannot see, and that is indifferent to our concerns. It is a prophecy of the path of our unchaining and of our ascent in a world of time, in which we remain always bound to death and forever denied insight into the ultimate nature of reality…. No philosopher or philosophical tradition in the last two centuries has had a monopoly on this prophecy. It is everywhere.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 27

Death, Age, World, Peace

“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

On Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

Beauty, Angels

“.. the present painter is not concerned with the process. Herein lies the difference between them and the Surrealists. At the same time in his desire, in his will to set down the ordered truth.... it can be said that the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely this that makes him an artist for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material, for the artist tries to wrest truth from the void..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 126

Truth, World, Time

“Beyond that void is a place
Where figments from bad dreams are banished
Childhood nightmares all come seeking
And adult logic nearly vanished”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics, Chaos

Dreams, Childhood

“The people of Iran are very talented people. They're heirs to one of the world's great civilizations. But in 1979, they were hijacked by religious zealots; religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship. That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world." I'm standing here in Washington, D. C. and the difference is so stark. America's founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Iran's founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad. And as states are collapsing across the Middle East, Iran is charging into the void to do just that.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)

Life, Death, Happiness, People

“What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

No. 1, "Walking With God"
Olney Hymns (1779)

World, Peace, Memory

“It will become an immediate certainty to the meditator that mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function. Nowhere, behind or within the function, can any individual agent or abiding entity be detected. By way of one’s own direct experience, one will this have arrived at the great truth of No-soul or Impersonality (anatta; Sanskrit anatma), showing that all existence is void of an abiding personality (self, soul, over-self, etc.) or an abiding substance of any description.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 38

Truth, Way, Soul, Personality

“Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)”

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 8, p. 119

Friendship, Sense, Personality

“Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

IV, 50
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Life, Past, Future

“Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead.
It is your world.
It is the world we will make for you.”

M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer

Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 8, “Chaos and Disorder” (p. 140)

World, Dead

“The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Star, Heart, Night

“The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 34

Animals

“He's a hollow man. He believes in anything. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty.”

Dean Koontz book From the Corner of His Eye

Source: From the Corner of His Eye (2000), Chapter 64; words of former policeman Thomas Vanadium

Men, Feeling

“The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

The Woman in White -
The Woman in White (1859)

Life, Beauty, Nature, Light

“If one category had to be designated as an emblem of my thought, it would be neither Cantor's pure multiple, nor Godel's constructible, nor the void, by which being is named, nor even the event, in which the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being originates. It would be the generic.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

“The steel and the space, or the object and the void, become one and the same.”

Richard Serra (1939) American sculptor

Charlie Rose interview (2001)

“The statute is like a tyrant; where he comes he makes all void; but the common law is like a nursing father, makes only void that part where the fault is, and preserves the rest.”

Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet (1554–1625) English politician

Quoted by Sir Thomas Twisden, 1st Baronet, C.J., in Maleverer v. Redshaw (1670), 1 Mod. Rep. 36 ; and by Wilmot, L.C.J., in Collins v. Blantern (1767), 2 Wils. 351.

Law, Parting

“[13 years old] After almost a month went by after getting World of Warcraft, I was finally able to play it. I made a WoW account with my father, and then I created my first character, a night elf druid. It really blew my mind. My first experience with WoW was like stepping into another world of excitement and adventure. It was a video game world, but they made it so realistic that it was like living another life, a more exciting life. My life was getting more and more depressing at that point, and WoW would fill in the void. It felt refreshing and relieving. I was only able to play it for a few hours for my first session. It was all I would think about when I wasn’t able to play it.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Pastimes

Life, World, Game, Thinking

“The famous MacGuffin, the Hitchockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself nothing at all - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them… - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is non the less efficient… what Lacan calls object petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

183
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. […] A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Lord Kitchener (1917), pp. 7–8 https://archive.org/stream/kitchener00chesuoft#page/7/mode/2up

World, Heart

“Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (January/February 1918), # 1104, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918 (p. 387)
1916 - 1920

“All of your days will be blessed so put on a smile and get dressed into the void we will fly away from here.”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

All Of Your Days Will Be Blessed

Smile, Flying

“Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.3, "Science", p. 15n
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Knowledge, Science, Flying

“Cursed is the man, and void of law and right,
Unworthy property, unworthy light,
Unfit for public rule, or private care,
That wretch, that monster, that delights in war:
Whose lust is murder, and whose horrid joy
To tear his country, and his kind destroy!”

Homér Iliad

IX. 63–64 (tr. Alexander Pope).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

War, Law, Tear, Light

“People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Book No-Thing-ness

People, World, Understanding, Thinking

“For wishes are effectual but by will,
And that too much is impotent and void
In frail humanity; and time steals by
Sinful and wavering, and unredeem’d.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A Summer Evening’s Tale
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Time

“You strip from me the laurel and the rose!
Take all! Despite you there is yet one thing
I hold against you all, and when, tonight,
I enter Christ's fair courts, and, lowly bowed,
Sweep with doffed casque the heavens' threshold blue,
One thing is left, that, void of stain or smutch,
I bear away despite you …
My panache.”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) French writer

Cyrano, Act 5, Sc. 6
Variant translation: I bear away despite you …
My plume!
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)

Christ

“There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?”

Wole Soyinka Death and the King's Horseman

Death and the King's Horseman (1975); cited from Six Plays (London: Methuen, 1984) p. 189.

Life, World, Home, Soul

“For the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there's no up nor down to it.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter X

Truth

“There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou — Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

No Coward Soul Is Mine (1846)
Context: p>With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou — Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.</p

Death, Art

“But then to wake and find it flown,
The dream of happiness destroyed,
To find myself unloved, alone,
What tongue can speak the dreary void?
A heart whence warm affections flow,
Creator, thou hast given to me,
And am I only thus to know
How sweet the joys of love would be?”

Anne Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Dreams (1845)

Love, Happiness, Dreams, Heart

“(After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Life, Fear, Hope, Way

“This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectabilitywith the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience—the "unitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 104-105

God, Stupidity, Soul, Intelligence

“The physicist's concept of nothing—the vacuum… began as empty space—the void… turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions of the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter nought "Nothingology—Flying to Nowhere"

Nature, Universe

“What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting… and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "On West Asia" at UC Berkeley, March 21, 2002 http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20020321.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2002 Context: [Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U. N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [... ] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [... ] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U. S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U. S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U. S. boycotted the meeting... and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

Silence

“Force, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil, and bruise itself.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. I : Apprentice, The Twelve-Inch Rule and Common Gavel, p. 1
Context: Force, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil, and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone; — not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp rocks by the impetus of his own blows.

Science

“The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-wizard-of-oz-1939 of The Wizard of Oz (22 December 1996) Reviews, Four star reviews Context: The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.

Children

“Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song I : Though the World Be A-Waning
Context: Love is enough: though the World be a-waning
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.

Love, Fear, Lovers

“Ye know not how void is your hope and your living:
Depart with your helping lest yet ye undo me!”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song IV: Draw Near and Behold Me
Context: Ye know not how void is your hope and your living:
Depart with your helping lest yet ye undo me!
Ye know not that at nightfall she draweth near to me,
There is soft speech between us and words of forgiving
Till in dead of the midnight her kisses thrill through me.
— Pass by me and harken, and waken me not!

Hope, Help

“An unseen and infinite presence is here; a sense of something greater than we possess; a seeking, through all the void wastes of life, for a good beyond it; a crying out of the heart for interpretation; a memory of the dead, touching continually some vibrating thread in this great tissue of mystery.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 191
Context: Life is no negative, or superficial or worldly existence. Our steps are evermore haunted with thoughts, far beyond their own range, which some have regarded as the reminiscences of a preesistent state. So it is with us all, in the beaten and worn track of this worldly pilgrimage. There is more here, than the world we live in. It is not all of life to live. An unseen and infinite presence is here; a sense of something greater than we possess; a seeking, through all the void wastes of life, for a good beyond it; a crying out of the heart for interpretation; a memory of the dead, touching continually some vibrating thread in this great tissue of mystery.

Life, Sense, Memory, Heart

“All things must needs be borne on through the calm void moving at equal rate with unequal weights.”
Omnia qua propter debent per inane quietum aeque ponderibus non aequis concita ferri.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book II, lines 238–239 (tr. Bailey)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

““And at last the darkness of the night descended and softly-kissed the surface of the watery grave and the only sound was the lonely rustle of the ancient trees,” I wrote as I penned the final line. I was excited; I read it over and saw that there was a yawning void in it. There was no plot, no action, nothing save atmosphere and longing and death. But I had never in my life done anything like it; I had made something, no matter how bad it was; and it was mine…Now, to whom could I show it?”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Life, Death, Kiss, Tree

“[I]t is impossible for motion to subsist without place, and void, and time.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. I, p. 136.
Physics

Time

“When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Book No-Thing-ness
Context: To attain the Way of strategy as a warrior you must study fully other martial arts and not deviate even a little from the Way of the warrior. With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour. Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.

“This world
A fading
Mountain echo
Void and
Unreal”

Ryōkan (1758–1831) Japanese Buddhist monk

Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf : Zen Poems of Ryokan (1993)

World, Mountain

Quotes about void page 3

Quotes about void
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