This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

Without knowledge, life is no more than the shadow of death

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow.... In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt.... There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and fleeting appearance.... A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow.... In this world — as I have known it — we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt.... There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and floating appearance.... A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains — but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

...this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is—nothing.

We are but dust and shadow.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.

This world that I live in is empty and cold; the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

The life of truth is cold.

I find the present monotonous and absurd spectacle of the world outside me so completely lacking in value or nobility that I can scarcely conceive of it as being the world.