no(thingness

 

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Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. 

It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. 

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the descernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. 

Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

—Albert Einstein

 

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God made everything out of nothing.

But the nothingness shows through.

—Paul Valéry

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"To every Form of being is assigned,"
Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage,
"An 'active' Principle:--howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.

Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

This is the freedom of the universe;
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind,
Its most apparent home."


—William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850
The Excursion, Book 9, excerpt

 

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