Logic is a carpet laid over an abyss.

— O. B. Hardison Jr.

It can be put this way. If I allow all things to vanish, then according to Newton the Galilean inertial space remains; following my interpretation, however, nothing remains.

— Albert Einstein

Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name.

— Frank Wilczek

The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy, and we don’t know what either of them is.

— Saul Perlmutter

Time comes to an end in a black hole.

— Stephen Hawking

If there were not void, things could not move at all; for that which is the property of body, to let and hinder, would be present to all things at all times; nothing therefore could go on, since no other thing would be the first to give way.

— Lucretius

So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.

— Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose

The vacuum of modern particle theory is a strange place indeed. From an unchanging “void” it has become an active arena out of which particles might be created or into which they might be destroyed . . . The vacuum might even be the “source” of all matter in the universe.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

The vacuum is truly a ‘living Form Void,’ pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction.

— Fritjof Capra

In the quantum realm, even nothing never sleeps. Nothing is always up to something. Even when there is absolutely nothing going on, and nothing there to do it.

— K. C. Cole

If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you’d have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side.

— Lawrence Rudnick

True talk of Nothing always remains unfamiliar. It does not allow itself to be made common. It dissolves, to be sure, if one places it in the cheap acid of a merely logical cleverness.

— Martin Heidegger

Although atoms are way more than 99.99 percent empty space, I have a real problem in walking through a wall.

— Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi

The truth is that emptiness is the norm of the universe. It is almost void of matter.

— John Stewart Collis

The vacuum is a garbage dump. Einstein freed us from it, now we’ve got to get rid of it again. Some kid now in junior high school will tell us how.

— Leon Lederman

Whenever it looks like there is ‘nothing,’ there is never ‘nothing’ there; it’s just the beginning of something else about to happen.

— Jose Rodriguez, junior high school student

From “You Don’t Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing: an illustrious collection of thoughts on nought,” conceived and edited by Joan Konner