Non-Being Quotes

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.

The wise person dines on something more subtle: He eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed, that all being flows from non-being, that the describable world emanates from an indescribable source.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.

When you're dead, you don't breathe, you don't see, you don't feel, you don't love.

Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.

Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

There are five things which no one is able to accomplish in this world: first, to cease growing old when he is growing old; second, to cease being sick; third, to cease dying; fourth, to deny dissolution when there is dissolution; fifth, to deny non-being.

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

And nothing is, but what is not.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.

I am not a bat. ~Rephaim

Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.

And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

I'm nothing, I'm not even here

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.