Nothing doing nothing going with constant consistence
Slumber asunder in no formidable thunder – do you often wonder about nothing and do nothing?

In King Lear
Now thou art an 0 without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing.

John of Holloywood
The tenth is called theca or circulus or figura nibili, because it stands for nothing. Yet when placed in its proper position it gives value to the others.

Fifteenth-century French book of arithmetic for traders
And of the ciphers [chiffres] there are but ten figures, of which nine are of value and the tenth is worth nothing [rien] but gives value to the others and is called zero [zero] or cipher [chiffre].

A place is nothing: not even space, unless at its heart – a figure stands.
Paul Dirac

Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest.
Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing really matters
Queen

…the library contains…Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ auto-biographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
Umberto Eco

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free.
Kris Kristofferson & Fred Foster

Martin Buber
A necessity I could not imagine swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or time without a beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless…Under an irresistible compulsion I reeled from one to the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of madness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness haunts being. That means that being has no need of nothingness in order to be conceived and that we can examine the idea of it exhaustively without finding there the least trace of nothingness. But on the other hand, nothingness, which is not, can only have a borrowed existence, and it gets its beings from being. Its nothingness of being is encountered only within the limits of being, and the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness. Non-being exists only on the surface of being.

‘I see nobody on the road, ‘ said Alice.
‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone, ‘ to be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!
Lewis Carroll

Brian Rotman
For Aristotle, engaged in classifying, ordering and analyzing the world into its irreducible and final categories, objects, causes and attributes, the prospect of an unclassifiable emptiness, and attributeless hole in the natural fabric of being, isolated from cause and effect and detached from what was palpable to the senses, must have presented itself as a dangerous sickness, a God-denying madness that left him with an ineradicable horror vacui.

Zeno’s paradoxes of motion
The Race Course
There can be no motion because anything that moves must reach the half-way point of its journey before it reached the end. So to cover on metre of the race course, you must first cover half a metre, before the one eight, and so on forever. How is it possible to reach an infinite number of positions in a finite time?
Achilles and the Turtle
Achilles can run 400 metres in a minute while a turtle can run 40 metres a minute. The turtle starts 400 metres ahead of Achilles. Achilles can never overtake the turtle because after Achilles has run 400 metres the turtle is still 40 metres ahead of him. By the time Achilles has covered these 40 metres (in a tenth of a minute), the turtle is still 4 metres ahead of him, and so on, forever.
(Well, talk about an unfair advantage!)

Beginning of belief in ether
Why does a magnet attract iron? Empedocles says that the iron is drawn to the magnet, because both give off amanations and because the size of the pores in the magnet correspond to the emanations of the iron…Thus , whenever the emanations of the iron approach the pores of the magnet and fit them in shape, the iron is drawn after the emanations and is attracted.

Empedocles
A when a girl, playing with the water catcher of shining brass – when, having placed the mouth of the pipe on her well-shaped hand she dips the vessel into the yielding substance of silvery water, still the volume of air pressing from inside on the many holes keeps out the water, until she discovers the condensed stream [of air]. Then at once when the air flows out, the water flows in an equal quantity.

Leucippus
Unless there is a void with a spate being of its own, ‘what is’ cannot be moved – nor again can it be ‘many’, since there is nothing to keep things apart.

Lucretius
Although all the atoms are in motion, their totality appears to stand totally motionless…This is because the atoms of all lie far below the range of our senses. Since they are themselves invisible, their movements also must elude observation. Indeed, even visible objects, when set at a distance, often disguise their movements. Often on a hillside fleecy sheep, as they crop their lush pasture, creep slowly onward, lured this way or that by grass that sparkles with fresh dew, while the full-fed lambs gaily frisk and butt. And yet, when we gaze from a distance – we see only a blur – a white patch stationary on the green hillside.

Aristotle reports Pythogoreans maiantained
The void exists…It is the void which keeps things distinct, being a kind of separation and division of things. This is true first and foremost of numbers; for the void keeps them distinct.

Isaac of Ninevah (AD 600)
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 form himself into himself, he is completely with God.

Miracles are explainable; it is the explanations that are miraculous.
Tim Robinson

But if there is a void above and a void below, a void within and a void without, he who is intent on escaping void has need of a certain imaginative mobility.
Robert M. Adams

Lucretius
If two bodies suddenly spring apart from contact on a broad surface, all the intervening space must be void until it is occupied by air. However quickly the air rushes in all round, the entire space cannot be filled instantaneously. The air must occupy one spot after another until it has taken possession of the whole space.

Newton
We are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof as the body of God. He is a uniform being, void of organs, members or parts,…being everywhere present to the things themselves. And since space is divisible in infinitum, and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions to space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in this.

Newton
What the space the is empty bodies is filled with.

Now is the discount of our winter tents.
Advertisement in Stratford-upon-Avon camping shop

Now is the winter of our discontent.
Shakespeare

Rosalie Colie
Were engaged in an operation at once imative and blasphemous, at once sacred and profane, since the formal paradox, conventionally regarded as low, parodies at the same time as is imitated the divine act of Creation. And yet m who can accuse the paradoxist of blasphemy, really? Since his subject is nothing , he cannot be said to be impious in taking the Creator’s prerogative as his own – for nothing, as all the men know can come of nothing. Nor indeed is he directing men to dangerous speculation, since at the very most he beguiles them into – nothing. And most important of all…of the paradoxist lies, he does not lie, since he lies about nothing.

The Prayse of Nothing
Nothing was first, and shall be last
For nothing holds for ever,
And nothing ever yet scap’t death
So can’t the longest liver:
Nothing’s so Immortall, nothing can,
From crosses ever keepe a man,
Nothing can live, when the world is gone,
For all shall come to nothing.

On the Letter O
But O enough, I have done my reader wrong
Mine O was round, and I have made it long.

Jean Passerat’s Nibil
Nothing is richer than precious stones and than gold; Nothing is finer than adamant; Nothing nobler than the blood of kings; nothing is sacred in wars; nothing is greater than Socrates’ wisdom – indeed, by his own affirmation, nothing is Socrates’ wisdom. Nothing is the subject of the speculations of the great Zero; nothing is higher than the heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than virtue.

Is this nothing?
Why, when the world and that’s in’t is nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
William Shakepeare, The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare
Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you.
Is not that strange?
Beatrice: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing as well as you. But believe me not; and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing.

Shakespeare, Macbeth
Nothing is
But what is not.

Shakespeare, Hamlet
…Life is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Prince of Denmark
Where Macbeth discovers that death is oblivion, Hamlet discovers that it is not. Macbeth discovers that, when death is oblivion, life is insignificant. Hamlet discovers that when one does not fear death, life with all its painful responsibilities can be borne and even borne nobly. In the end Hamlet knows for himself the relation between ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ by which even his own death can affirm life.

Shakepeare (Afrikaans: Wilhelm Wikkelspies :-)
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

Shakespeare
Lear…what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak!
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Shakepeare, Fool to Lear
Thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Nothingness is not, Nothingness is ‘made-to-be’, Nothingness does not nihilateitself; Nothingness ‘is nihilated’…It would be inconceivable that a Being which is full positivity would maintain and create outside itself a Nothingness or transcendent being, for there would be Nothing in being by which Being would surpass itself into Non-Being. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world must nihilate Nothingness in its Being, and even so it still runs the risk of establishing Nothingness as a transcendent in the very heart of immanence unless if nihilates Nothingness in connection with its own being. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world is a being such that in its Being, the nothingness of its Being is in question. The being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness…

Laurence Kushner
What did the mystic say to the hot-dog vendor?
Make me one with everything.

Galileo
The human intellect does understand some proportions perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as Nature itself has. Of such are the mathematical sciences alone; that is, geometry and arithmetic, in which the Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more proportions, since it knows them all. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does not understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty.

On the empty desk sat an empty glass of milk.
BBC Radio

Nature, it seems, is the popular name
For milliards and milliards and milliards
Of particles playing their infinite games
Of billiards and billiards and billiards
Piet Hein
(Notice how absence of full stop accentuates concept of continuity into infinity ad infinitum.)

Otto von Guericke
To delve into the manifold mysteries of nature
Is the task of an enquiring an fertile mind.
To follow the tortuous paths of nature’s wondrous ways
Is work more difficult and not designed for everyone.

Von Guericke
Everything is in Nothing and if God should reduce the fabric of the world, which he created into Nothing, nothing would remain of its place other than Nothing (just as it was before the creation of the world), that is, the Uncreated. For the Uncreated is that whose beginning does not pre-exist; and Nothing, we say, is that whose beginning does nor pre-exist. Nothing contains all things. It is more precious than gold, without beginning and end, more joyous than the perception of bountiful light, more noble than the blood of kings, comparable to the heavens, higher than the stars, comparable to a stroke of lightning, perfect and blessed in every way. Nothing always inspires. Where nothing is, there ceases the jurisdiction of all kings. Nothing is without any mischief. According to Job, the Earth is suspended over Nothing. Nothing is outside the world. Nothing is everywhere. They say the vacuum is Nothing; and the say that imaginary space – and space itself – is Nothing.

The idea of an omnipresent medium has considerable attractions for the scientist. It enables him, for example, to explain how such familiar phenomena as light, heat, sound and magnetism can operate over great distances and travel through a seemingly empty space.
Derek Gjertsen

Nothing is enough for a man to whom enough is too little.
Epicurus

Newton
It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus be essential and inherent in it…That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to the matter, so that on body may act upon another as a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, it is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.

Newton
A Medium exceedingly more rare and elastic than Air, and by consequence exceedingly less able to resist the motion of Projectiles, and exceedingly more able to press upon gross Bodies, by endeavouring to expand itself.
John Gore
It has been argued by some astronomers that the number of the stars must be limited, or on the supposition of an infinite number uniformly scattered through space, it would follow that the whole heavens would shine with a uniform light, probably equal to that of the sun.

Gore and Simon Newcomb
We may consider…the reflecting vacuum as forming the internal surface of a hollow sphere.

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence…someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence never.
Franz Kafka