Quotes About Nihilism

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism.

John Green

#4. There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.

Cynthia Daignault

#5. Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism.

John Milbank

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#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. Nihilism is the moral equivalent of weightlessness.

Myself

#12. 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

#13. Enlightenment, if left unclouded by pathetic fancy, leads to a very special and bracing sort of nihilism - positivist, rationalist ... merciless.

David Bentley Hart

#14. The combination of parental abdication and social liberalism in our schools means that kids are easy targets for nihilism and moral subjectivism.

Ben Shapiro

#15. Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Rollo May

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void.

Philip K. Dick

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Nihilism has no point. There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man

Victor Hugo

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#35. 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.

#36. My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.

Sebastian Horsley

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

Leonard Baskin

#40. I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

Ellen Willis

#41. 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

#42. The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism,

Leo Strauss

#43. 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

#44. Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Albert Camus

#45. There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

Jean Baudrillard

#46. Nihilism, there's really nothing to it.

Dean Cavanagh

#47. Majeed was a self-confessed Holocaust denier. I had witnessed his indignant nihilism about the six million condemned to be extinguished infinitely in countless narrow minds like his. Despite his intelligence, he possessed capacities I had never previously encountered. I

Qanta A. Ahmed

#48. If critics and fanboys weren't suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level.

Armond White

#49. I don't see any point in nihilism ... just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else.

John Green

#50. Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.

Matt Groening

#51. A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might - gainsaying everything - shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.

Emil M. Cioran

#52. If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.

Simone De Beauvoir

#53. It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything.

Catherynne M Valente

#54. Nihilism is best done by professionals.

Iggy Pop

#55. I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism.

Marina Keegan

#56. The problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

John Green

#57. so many people have been hypnotized by Aristotelian 'yes/ no' logic to the extent that any step beyond that Bronze Age mythos seems to them a whirling, dizzying plunge into a pit of Chaos and the Dark Night of Nihilism.

Robert Anton Wilson

#58. The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!

Jim Starlin

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

Victor Hugo

#60. I was not okay for one thing.For another, I'd passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit and beyond.

T.C. Boyle

#61. Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

David Foster Wallace

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?
that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#65. Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Susan Sontag

#66. Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

Ayelet Waldman

#67. Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.

Sam Harris

#68. Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.

Dean Ornish

#69. The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Albert Camus

#70. The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and , as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism.

Adolf Hitler

#71. 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

#72. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the "in vain," insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure- - being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long. -

Friedrich Nietzsche

#73. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

Anne Rice

#74. Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.

Hannah Arendt

#75. 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

#76. The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.

Sharon Salzberg

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.

John N. Gray

#80. After years of watching the comic face of nihilism, your children will come to respect nothing, love nothing, believe in nothing, and long for nothing.

Anthony M. Esolen

#81. In account after account of exorcisms the demonic voices will propound nihilism of one variety or another.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#82. 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

#83. Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.

Cornel West

#84. It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.

Karl Popper

#85. Suicide attacks are the actions of losers who have nothing left to lose. In this case, Islam serves as a mask, a cover for desperation and nihilism, but not for religion.

Walter Kasper

#86. ...not positive about the definition of existentialism but it seems like the opposite of nihilism in which case I suppose I may be.

Autumn

#87. If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.

Reginald Horace Blyth

#88. Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters - we're cosmically alone.

Ben Shapiro

#89. 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

#90. A widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

Charles Colson

#91. Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

Alain Badiou

#92. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his new found nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed , didn't it , that there was nothing worth dying for either.

Clive Barker

#93. Religion itself cannot but be dynamic. In order to combat modern materialistic mores, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#94. 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

#95. Somethingism is better than nihilism.

Anthony Marais

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

#97. The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

Irving Kristol

#98. I feel as if I had been born dead under
American bombardment.

Stefan Bolea

#99. All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#100. 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