I Know Nothing

From The Quotable Nothing Book, Running Press, 1980:

Non-being penetrates that in which there is no space. Through this I know the advantage of taking no action.
— Lao Tzu

Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between.
— Vladimir Nabakov

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
— Seneca

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
— Paul Valéry

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that, from our very prison, we should draw from our own selves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
— André Malraux

There is as much difference between nothingness and empty space as there is between empty space and material body.
— Blaise Pascal

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
— Gertrude Stein

Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you're dressed for it.
— Woody Allen

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We must know what is truly beautiful, what is ugly; what befits man; what can fill him with wonder without confounding him, possess him without stupefying him.... It is that which puts him, without effort, above his own nature.
— Paul Valéry, Paul Valéry: Dialogues, pp. xii.

An artist is worth a thousand centuries.
— Paul Valéry, Ibid., p. xii.

Man can act only because he can ignore.
— Paul Valéry, Ibid., p. xii.

The greatest liberty is born of the greatest rigor.
— Paul Valéry, Ibid., p. xiii.

....André Levinson said in relation to Dance and the Soul: "To explain a thing is to deform it; to think is to substitute what is arbitrary for the unknowable truth."
— Paul Valéry, Ibid., p. xxviii.