Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
The author asks nature to dissolve their identity into a formless state.
In plain terms
The author wants nature to take them back and turn them into something else, not themselves.
What can you take from it?
There is a desire to escape the constraints of individual identity.

Where it applies

  • spiritual reflection
  • existential crisis
  • philosophy

Putting it to work

  • reflect on identity
  • consider impermanence
  • find connection with nature

Questions to consider

  • What does it mean to be yourself?
  • Would you choose to be nothing?

Another view

This wish negates the value of individual existence and relationships.

More from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  1. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much g…

    Permalink to quote #12
  2. People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a…

    Permalink to quote #14
  3. He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long a…

    Permalink to quote #11

Related quotes

  1. All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.

    Richard BrautiganRichard Brautigan quote #7
  2. We're not earthly beings any more: we're cosmic beings.

    Eden AhbezEden Ahbez quote #8
  3. Man is an imagining being.

    Gaston BachelardGaston Bachelard quote #17