Self-Annihilation Quotes

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.

The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

A lover asked his beloved, Do you love yourself more than you love me? Beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you. I've disappeared from myself and my attributes, I am present only for you. I've forgotten all my learnings, but from knowing you I've become a scholar. I've lost all my strength, but from your power I am able. I love myself...I love you. I love you...I love myself.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

I stopped and I thought, 'What would Jesus do?' So I didn't exist.

Always destroy what is in you.

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.

Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness

What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am.

There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved. And a voice answered and said, 'Who is there?' The lover replied, 'It is I.' 'Go hence,' returned the voice; 'there is no room within for thee and me.' Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded, 'Who is there?' He answered, 'It is thou.' 'Enter,' said the voice, 'for I am within.

Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

In exactly the same way, ... scatter your body, your feeling, your perception, your predispositions, your discriminative consciousness, break them up, knock them down, cease to play with them, apply yourself to the destruction of craving for them. Verily, ... the extinction of craving is Nirvana.

Remember God so much that you are forgotten. Let the caller and the called disappear; be lost in the Call.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

destruction is ultimately self-destruction.

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.

The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.