Quotes About Nihilism

Everything is absurd.

For everything that exists I feel a visual affection, an intellectual fondness – nothing in the heart. I have faith in nothing, hope in nothing, charity for nothing. I feel only horror and nausea for the sincere souls of all sincerities and the mystics of all mysticisms, or rather, for the sincerities of all sincere souls and the mysticisms of all mystics.

A vida é oca, a alma é oca, o mundo é oco. Todos os deuses morrem de uma morte maior que a morte. Tudo está mais vazio que o vácuo. E tudo um caos de coisas nenhumas.

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.

You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

My life is utterly meaningless

L'avenir est à Dieu, le présent est à nous, mais le passé est au néant.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death.

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

We can also lose our way if we misunderstand selflessness or emptiness. When we confuse relative reality with ultimate reality, or misinterpret ultimate reality as something that destroys the conventional world, then we fall into the trap of the nihilists who see no meaning or purpose in life. Then our view of emptiness is inspired by sadness and depression, and it becomes just another tool to shut everything down. Instead of looking at the world with joy, we see it as hopeless.

because human existence is ultimately meaningless.

Ne pas naître est sans contredit la meilleur formule qui soit. Elle n'est malheureusement à la portée de personne

But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

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.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

I don't think I can write a book as nihilistic as some of my early ones. They're so bleak. I don't think I would enjoy that as much anymore. You really become fixated on ways out.

My consultants recommended several nihilists and existentialists but I rejected them all. A black turtleneck sweater does not a misanthrope make. Nihilists and existentialists tend to be bohemians, who invariably run in packs; despite their alienated stance, they have always struck me as a sociable lot who surround themselves with people because they are forever saying Nothing matters, and they need someone to say it to.

We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head. — Franz Kafka, quoted in Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings . (Belknap Press; First Edition edition December 1, 1996)