Emptying Quotes

I built my house from barley rice Green pepper walls and water ice – And everything emptying into White. (Cat Stevens)
Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all thought, for thought and feeling dissipate energy.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Life was a throwing off for poor aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying the pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still refers to as the poor Jews of Palestine.
Philip Roth
There's a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought.
Jean-François Lyotard
To be simple is to accept the essence of the message and not try to twist it or adapt it to our own ideas. To be simple we must desire to remain in the image of God. We must not be so complex that we make God into our image! Simplicity is dying to self, an emptying.
Catherine Doherty
Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern, Watching the night and its candles gutter, Snoring at sunrise. In England now the wind blows high And clouds brush rudely at the sky; The blood runs thinly through my frame, I half-caress the hearthstone's flame, Oppressed by autumn's desolate cry. Then homesick for the south am I, For where the lucky swallows fly, But each warm land is just a name In England now. The luckless workers I espy With chins dipped low and collars high, Walk into winter, do not blame The shifting globe. A gust of shame Represses my unmanly sigh In England now.
Anthony Burgess
Now the towns and forests, highways and plains, fall back in circles like an emptying drain. And I won't come round this way again, where the lonely wind abides, and you will not take my heart, alive.
Joanna Newsom
The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.
Greg Egan
A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. "Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.
Charles Stross
He bent above: so still her breath What air she breathed he could not say, Whether in worlds of life or death: So softly ebbed away, away The life that had been light to him, So fled her beauty leaving dim The emptying chambers of his heart Thrilled only by the pang and smart, The dull and throbbing agony That suffers still, yet knows not why.
George William Russell
A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. (Sam Keen)
Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
Richard Nixon
Empathy: Emptying our mind and listening with our whole being.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
Sebastian Junger
They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship's air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.
Daniel Abraham
We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.
Nicholas G. Carr
Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes, and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,' and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Who applies for that job? Who says "I want to work in lost luggage"? You don't have a good day. That's like having a job emptying port-a-potties. You're just going to catch crap all day long.
Bill Engvall
There is a deeper joy in emptying ourselves.
Kuruvilla Pandikattu
There is a deeper joy in emptying ourselves/ A deeper fulfilment in commitment/ A nobler life in letting ourselves go/ a truer self in not clinging on to my self! (Kuruvilla Pandikattu)
Boundless intemperance In nature is a tyranny; it hath been The untimely emptying of the happy throne, And fall of many kings.
William Shakespeare
Historically, as the faith dies, the culture and civilization to which it gave birth die, and then the people die. And a new tribe with its own gods comes to occupy the emptying land. On the old and new continents, it is the native-born of European ancestry who are de-Christianizing, aging and dying.
Pat Buchanan
So you must ask this question, put this question to yourself, whether your mind can be empty of all its past and yet retain the technological knowledge, your engineering knowledge, your linguistic knowledge, the memory of all that, and yet function from a mind that is completely empty. The emptying of that mind comes about naturally, sweetly without bidding, when you understand yourself, when you understand what you are. What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts. When you understand that, look at it, observe it; and when you observe it, see in that observation that there is no duality between the observer and the observed; then when you see that, you will see that your mind can be completely empty, attentive, and in that attention you can act wholly, without any fragmentation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy