Lao Tzu Quotes

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.

Thirty spokes meet in the hub. Where a wheel isn't is where it's useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pots not is where it's useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn't, there's room for you. So the profit in what is, is in the use of what isn't.

Cut out doors and windows for the house. The holes make it useful.

Clay is fashioned into vessels; it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a dwelling, and on the empty space within, its use depends. Thus, while the existence of things may be good, it is the non-existence in them that makes them serviceable.

Mold clay into a bowl. The empty space makes it useful.

The usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Nothingness not being nothing, nothingness being emptiness.

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

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!

All things in their beeing are good for something.

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

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.

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

Space has no "existence." "To exist" literally means "to stand out." You cannot understand space because it doesn't stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the unmanifested.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.

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

I am nothing, and not even that.

The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.