Throughout history, philosophers, scientists, poets, and spiritual teachers have grappled with the concept of nothing—the void, emptiness, absence, and non-being. Their insights reveal that nothing is, paradoxically, something profoundly significant. The Official Website of Nothing presents this collection of quotes about nothing as windows into the depths of this elusive concept.
"Nothing will come of nothing."
William Shakespeare
King Lear (1606)
"To do nothing is the way to be nothing."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The American Notebooks (1835-1853)
"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value (1980)
"The nothing itself nothings."
Martin Heidegger
What is Metaphysics? (1929)
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
Albert Einstein
Living Philosophies (1931)
"Man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness (1943)
"Pure Being and Pure Nothing are, therefore, the same."
G.W.F. Hegel
Science of Logic (1812)
"When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
"Nature abhors a vacuum."
Attributed to Aristotle
Paraphrase of concepts in Physics
"In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace."
Michio Kaku
Hyperspace (1994)
"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
J.B.S. Haldane
Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
Stephen Hawking
Der Spiegel Interview (1988)
"Empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics."
John Archibald Wheeler
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (1998)
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
Democritus
Ancient Greek philosophy, circa 460-370 BCE
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."
The Heart Sutra
Buddhist text, circa 1st century CE
"Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities."
D.T. Suzuki
Zen and Japanese Culture (1959)
"The Tao is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled."
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 4 (circa 6th century BCE)
"We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want."
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11 (circa 6th century BCE)
"Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub; It is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there."
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11 (circa 6th century BCE)
"Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."
Qingyuan Weixin
Tang Dynasty Zen master
"The mind is like the sky and thoughts are like clouds. No matter how many clouds there are or how dark they might be, the sky is never harmed by them. The nature of the sky is always clear."
Buddhist teaching
Common meditation instruction
"To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things."
Dogen Zenji
Genjokoan (13th century)
"Nothing is more real than nothing."
Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies (1951)
"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."
John Cage
On his composition 4'33" (1952)
"The rest is silence."
William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1600)
"The art of doing nothing is the hardest act to master."
Oscar Wilde
Attributed
"Everything that is not something must be nothing, and that which is nothing must be nothing at all."
Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
"Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them."
Charles Lamb
Essays of Elia (1823)
"Nothingness haunts being."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness (1943)
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)
"In order to say that there is nothing, there must be someone to say it."
Georges Bataille
Inner Experience (1943)
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself."
Martin Heidegger
Being and Time (1927)
"Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole."
Martin Heidegger
What is Metaphysics? (1929)
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science (1882)
"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."
Bertrand Russell
Letter to Colette O'Niel (1924)
"The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality, no matter how far we go. It is only to be found in nothingness."
Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace (1952)
"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."
Carl Sagan
Contact (1985)
These quotes reveal how the concept of nothing has fascinated human thought across cultures, disciplines, and eras. From the Eastern philosophical embrace of emptiness as a fertile void to the Western existentialist confrontation with nothingness as the ground of being, these varied perspectives offer glimpses into the paradoxical richness of nothing.
What emerges from this collection is not a unified theory of nothingness, but rather a multifaceted exploration that reveals how thinking about nothing often leads to profound insights about everything. The void, rather than being merely an absence to be avoided, becomes a space of possibility, mystery, and even liberation.
In contemplating these quotes, we participate in humanity's ongoing fascination with what isn't there—the spaces between atoms, the silence between notes, the pauses between words, and the emptiness that gives form to being. Through these reflections on nothing, we paradoxically discover something essential about the human condition and our place in the cosmos.
The Official Website of Nothing invites you to return to these quotes regularly, allowing their insights to resonate with your own experience of both nothing and something. In a world increasingly filled with noise, content, and constant stimulation, these reflections on nothing offer a counterbalance—a reminder of the value and significance of absence, emptiness, and void.