Philosophy Nihilism Quotes

#1. To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

Peter Singer

#2. Nihilism is ... not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#3. Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,

Michel Houellebecq

#4. 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

#5. It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#6. 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

#7. In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.

John Marmysz

#8. There must be no final truths; only burning questions.

John Marmysz

#9. Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Victor Hugo

#10. 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

#11. I do not teach students anything. I learn along with them.

John Marmysz

#12. I might be a nihilist except that I don't believe in anything.

Mitchell Heisman

#13. The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

Yukio Mishima

#14. 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

#15. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

Chuck Klosterman

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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