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To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise. But I believe that I am supported in my creed of Materialism by the Locks, the Traceys, and the Stewarts. Thomas Jefferson
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. Rene Descartes
Death isn’t peaceful; it is just nothing. Everything is gone. No more sunrises, no more hopes, no more fears. Nothing. Linda Howard, Kill and Tell
Woody Allen: That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?
Woman: Yes it is.
Woody Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It re-states the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos. Play It Again, Sam 1972 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & Jerry Lacy & Tony Roberts & Susan Anspach et al, director Herbert Ross
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it. Woody Allen
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I definitely overpaid for my carpet. Woody Allen
There’s no ghosts. There’s no God. The Young Ones s2e2: Cash ***** Rick, BBC 1984
The Elite who occupy the commanding heights or digital reality are suicidal nihilists.
Suicidal nihilists know that there is no longer any substantive purpose to their willing. But they would always prefer to go on willing than not to act at all.
They can very happily ally themselves with a notion of a nuclear holocaust or perfect extremism. Arthur Crocker
Does she truly want to be no-one? Game of Thrones s5e6: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken, bloke to girl, HBO 2015
Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the Perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of non-being. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in non-being, then God is non-being. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticisms of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist. Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of a being – like a worm. Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness haunts being. Jean-Paul Sartre
Science has looked, and sees no life but this:
Or, at the most ’tis hypothetical.
’Thou art as animals, as worms, as clay;
Earth – thy small planet, of a thousand, one –
Shall slowly waste, unto an outburnt ash:
And thou and all thy race, be blotted out.
For in the dissolution of man’s brain
Himself dissolves, and passes into night. Wilfred Owen, Science Has Looked
It is contrary to reason to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. Rene Descartes
Kirk: What you are describing is ...?
Spock: Non-existence. Star Trek s1e27: The Alternative Factor
Nausea, dizziness, unspeakable dread: nihilophobia – the fear of nothingness ... The existential horror of it all. Star Trek: Voyager s5e1: Night, Doctor to Neelix
They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginning-less past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. – I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech – inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
A woman who has recently become aware of the massive and total futility of her life. Boys from The Blackstuff: Shop thy Neighbour, social security boss to officer, BBC 1982
I believe in nothing. We are born and we die and that’s it: there’s nothing else. Francis Bacon, interview Melvyn Bragg South Bank Show 1985
I’m optimistic about nothing. ibid.
In all these places I was looking at and thinking deeply about nothing. In the world of now there are artists painting blank canvases – paintings of nothing. Because in modern art shocks matter, beauty matters, but nothing matters too. Why does modern art endlessly return to blanks and emptiness? Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? IV: Nothing Matters
Modern artists making something out of nothing. ibid.
Robert Rauschenberg: ‘There’s the meaning of the experience of seeing it [white canvass].’ ibid.
Rothko was appalled by a lot of modern art. The way it was going … And we’ve given him the job of being our tragic artist of nothingness. ibid.
The Rothko Chapel: His paintings here are the grandest, darkest, blackest, most unfathomable ones he ever made. Bloody hell, they’re black. ibid.
Yves Klein: This is International Klein Blue (IKB), an ultra-marine pigment Klein patented in his own name to make monograms with. The sound you’re hearing is the sound of an orchestra playing, a whole orchestra, one note. ibid.
Klein’s theatracality is very much in tune with nowadays. ibid.
He really was a judo expert. He really was a member of the secret society of Rosicrucians. ibid.
Klein was a performer, an alchemist, an inspired fantasist. His void was a theatrical void and a magic void. ibid.
And now the blue void which Yves Klein finally disappeared into June 6th 1962, aged 34, after his 3rd heart attack. ibid.
Nothingness became very big in New York’ art, almost the main thing. ibid.
Minimal Art and Conceptual Art – the other two big movements in New York art of the ’60s after Pop Art. ibid.
Minimalism came out in the early 1960s: it was the hardest look modern art had yet come up with. ibid.
Was the object still art when nobody was looking at it? ibid.
The Tate Gallery bricks: Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre … Andre’s stripping down to almost nothing. ibid.
[Donald] Judd: he’s one of modern art’s most powerful father figures: no-one can kill him. He’s certainly an authority for me – boxes live on. ibid.
The trademark Judd look is a factory-fabricated, machine-made look. It had to be made just so, and it had to be placed just so. ibid.
But if Donald Judd is awesome, a modern art father figure, he is a rather Old Testament figure … His own art is becoming part of a tourist industry [Texas]. ibid.
[Richard] Serra was a mythic artist in the last ’60s movement of Post-minimalism … Post-minimalism, a type of minimalism [Richard] Serra stands for, was minimalism that was curvy or scattered rather than square or cubified. ibid.
Emptiness: post-modern art of the ’70s and ’80s was an art where all the old meanings were drained out. ibid.
Glenn Brown: Zombies of the Stratosphere, 1998. ibid.
Hi, I’m in black and white this week, depressed, life is hopeless, death is a constant, all accident is futile wherever you go; you can’t be certain you’re not just going nowhere: this is nihilism, to believe in nothing. Matthew Collings, Hello Culture: Nihilism, Channel 4 2001
Nihilism: It’s the really big ISM of the 20th century. ibid.
Every age has its own apocalypse fantasy. ibid.
Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa. ibid.
Nihilism rejects everything even its own. ibid.
Nihilists see existence as irrational and meaningless. ibid.
Beckett: The master of seeing everything so clearly it might make you commit suicide … He sees the utter reality of the meaningless of everything, but, well, he loves language. ibid.
Solzhenitsyn: he was secretly writing a novel … Faced by the failure of the revolutionary dream, it was now difficult to believe in anything. That maybe ideology itself was the problem … But in every case, he said, thousands and often millions were killed. Solzhenitsyn’s book contained a damning conclusion … The only way to escape from that horror was to stop trying to change the world. Instead the safest thing to believe in the future was to believe in nothing. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died. William Faulkner, letter to Malcolm Cowley 11th February 1949