Top 100 Nihilism's Quotes
#1. I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing-Oh, make haste!
Omar Khayyam
#3. In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
Annie Proulx
#4. I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.
Leonard Baskin
#5. What's disappointing is that it's just another mold, you leave one cliche and end up right back in another. Not really that subversive or out of control.
Virginie Despentes
#6. The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence ...
Michael Ignatieff
#7. (...) pick up your axe, start at the roots
don't miss the trunk, never forget:
to end life truly and finally
start at the roots or end there.
Moonshine Noire
#8. In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend's suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!
Ivan Turgenev
#9. What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).
Jean Baudrillard
#10. Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead
Nay, I swim with sea-demons
no sweet summer tuned radio
over my sunless desertscape
how does it burn without the sun?
Moonshine Noire
#11. It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#12. Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
Jean Baudrillard
#13. My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.
Sebastian Horsley
#14. No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?
Garth Risk Hallberg
#15. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
#16. If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Albert Camus
#17. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#18. The rather difficult antagonists towards the Church consist not nearly of the cruel and heartless, nihilistic intellectuals who hate God and humanity, but the well-meaning spirits who for the most part lack an understanding of the Spirit.
Criss Jami
#19. That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. Despite its successes, in the end, philosophical thinking always falls short of its real goal. It involves both the wonder of aspiring toward the Truth and the distress of falling short of that Truth. In this way, philosophy can be characterized as wondrous distress.
John Marmysz
#22. She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.
Stephanie Kallos
#23. [S]ince there is no wrong or right, you just reap what you sow.
Peter Murphy
#24. The born again nihilist has nothing to blame for their fall
Dean Cavanagh
#25. Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they're no longer alone.
Gordon G. Chang
#27. I like the idea of being sort of withdrawn and mysterious, and what can be more mysterious that someone wearing a trash bag, like a dark trash bag, with eye holes that say "nihilism?" You'd be curious. What's underneath that? Is it perfect? Or is it broken?
Eugene Mirman
#28. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
Joseph Heller
#29. Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool to be an idiot. A jackass. It's cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show.
Greg Gutfeld
#30. Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
Brent Weeks
#31. Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.
Alan Moore
#33. It's all about realizing what you're doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them-'
William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside
Kristopher Jansma
#34. That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.
Alan Moore
#36. Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.
Michael Shermer
#37. I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.
Bruce Springsteen
#38. If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
Flannery O'Connor
#39. I think that today, integration is the name of the game and not separating these things out, and not trying to find the razor's edge, the narrow path. There's a lot of lanes in the highway, the trick is not fall into the ditches on either side, like a one sided nihilism, nothing matters life.
Surya Das
#40. If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
Chuck Palahniuk
#41. Nature's not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
Ivan Turgenev
#43. Inexpedient: Not calculated to advance one's interests.
Ambrose Bierce
#44. Disappear Here.
The syringe fills with blood.
You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.
Wonder if he's for sale.
People are afraid to merge. To merge.
Bret Easton Ellis
#45. I'm thinking maybe letting the latches burn is the right idea. Let everything burn until there's nothing left but ashes and cool rain.
Rodman Philbrick
#47. There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful
Sarah Kane
#48. If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered. This infirmity is at the root of all idealism. Morality has no faith in the world.
Albert Camus
#49. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
Yukio Mishima
#50. I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.
Ellen Willis
#51. For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.
Thomas Ligotti
#52. The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.
William Barrett
#53. The combination of parental abdication and social liberalism in our schools means that kids are easy targets for nihilism and moral subjectivism.
Ben Shapiro
#55. Enlightenment, if left unclouded by pathetic fancy, leads to a very special and bracing sort of nihilism - positivist, rationalist ... merciless.
David Bentley Hart
#56. This is Europe's true predicament: together with the fear of man we have also lost the love of man, reverence for man, confidence in man, indeed the will to man. Now the sight of man makes us weary. What is nihilism today if not that?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. Nihilism is the moral equivalent of weightlessness.
Myself
#58. Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.
Simon Critchley
#59. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
Rebecca Solnit
#60. Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism.
Rob Brezsny
#61. Chasms are deceived by rumors of their depth.
Marty Rubin
#63. But then there's loneliness. However you might philosophise about it, loneliness is a terrible thing, my dear fellow ... Although in reality, of course, it's absolutely of no importance!
Anton Chekhov
#64. For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.
Alain Badiou
#65. Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
Rollo May
#66. Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
Elena Ferrante
#67. That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
Eugene Ionesco
#68. That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
Anne Sexton
#69. Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism.
John Milbank
#70. There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.
Cynthia Daignault
#71. I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism.
John Green
#72. Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.
Simon Critchley
#73. But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.
George Pattison
#74. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.
John Fowles
#75. All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. I feel as if I had been born dead under
American bombardment.
Stefan Bolea
#77. That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause.
Harvey Mansfield
#78. I am against nationalism, and I am against patriotism. They are both the dark side. It is time not simply to redefine a kinder-and-gentler patriotism, but to sweep away the notion and acknowledge it as morally, politically, and intellectually bankrupt. It is time to scrap patriotism.
Robert Jensen
#79. We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life ... We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
Mikhail Bakunin
#80. The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.
Leo Strauss
#81. One explains things until things have no meaning anymore.
Marty Rubin
#82. How can you expect my character to be solidly real, to be anything other than obviously imaginary, when everything is contingent anyway? My Character has been deformed out of reality by his own nihilism, his own metaphysical nothingness.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#83. With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists itself.
Victor Hugo
#84. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.
Bret Easton Ellis
#86. The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
Chris Hedges
#88. In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.
Martin Heidegger
#89. The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.
Frederick C. Beiser
#90. [R]eligious concepts are parasitic upon moral intuitions.
Pascal Boyer
#91. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.
Paul Beatty
#92. Nihilism has no point. There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man
Victor Hugo
#93. What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality - as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
Hannah Arendt
#94. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And
Doris Lessing
#95. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.
William Kentridge
#96. That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos - that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.
Theodore Dalrymple
#97. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void.
Philip K. Dick
#98. Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power ... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
Octavio Paz
#100. The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.
Frederick C. Beiser
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