A Quote by Henri Nouwen

It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Henri Nouwen

Quote Topics

Alone Am Believe Cell Christ Confrontation Desert Distractions Door Dreadful Everything Face Forces Forget Friends Frightening Get Jesus Jesus Christ Leave Leave Me Alone Lord Lord Jesus Lord Jesus Christ Make Me Me Alone My Friends Myself Nothingness Our Ourselves Own Persevere Pounding Run Seductive Solitude Something Stay Surrender Task Tired Totally Unconditionally Until Us Visitors Wants Wisdom Work Worth

Quote Author

Henri Nouwen
Dutch - Priest
January 24, 1932 - September 21, 1996

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Emile M. Cioran

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Virginia Woolf

I have tried very hard to find meaning in what I do, but I have found instead a vast and limitless nothingness. I tried to embrace the nothingness, but it slipped through my grasp, and now there is nothing where the nothingness was. This may sound meaningful, but it isn't.

John S. Hall

The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.

Harry Dean Stanton

We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

George MacDonald

The way of nothingness is the way of Zen. It is just a term. The contemplation of nothingness or everythingness is where everything starts.

Frederick Lenz

If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.

Tadao Ando

To unmask the deceit of every instinct for preservation is to procure salvation for humanity in nothingness.. ..Nothingness must be defined as the absense of all willing.

Maurice Blondel

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

Norman Mailer

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

Andre Maurois

I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.

Wernher von Braun

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

Timothy Morton

Like the hollow nothingness within the seed of a tree, which contains the potential of the entire tree, the experience of nothingness in the unmanifest field has within it the lively potential of everything in creation.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

My Lord Jesus Christ, who, for the love You bear to mankind, do remain night and day in this Sacrament, full of pity and love, awaiting, calling, and receiving all who come to visit You; I believe that You are present in the Sacrament of the Altar; I adore You from the depths of my own nothingness; I thank You for the many graces You have given me, and especially for having given me Yourself in this Sacrament.

Alphonsus Liguori

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our life, which is inaccessable to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.

Thomas Merton

A Quote by Henri Nouwen

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors