These Nihilism quotes will inspire you. Nihilism is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, expressing negation (i.e., denial of) towards general aspects of life that are widely accepted within humanity as objectively real, such as knowledge, existence, and the meaning of life.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging nihilism quotes, nihilism sayings, and nihilism proverbs.
Inspirational Nihilism Quotes
- “Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” ~ William Shakespeare, Nihilism quotes on life
- “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” ~ Albert Camus
- “what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There’s only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?” ~ Blaise Cendrars
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“What can be broken, should be broken.” ~ Dmitry Pisarev
- “There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.” ~ Emile M. Cioran
- “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight – brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” ~ Unknown
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“The point is there ain’t no point.” ~ Cormac McCarthy
- “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
- “There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.” ~ Rebecca Solnit
- “Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!” ~ Mikhail Bakunin
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“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “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
- “Nihilism is not only despair and negation but above all the desire to despair and to negate.” ~ Albert Camus
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“A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing , but one who does not believe in what exists.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something.” ~ Dennis Prager
- “God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.” ~ John Dewey
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“Say what you want about the deaf.” ~ Jimmy Carr
- “The problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.” ~ John Green
- “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., Nihilism quotes science
- “And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“[S]ince there is no wrong or right, you just reap what you sow.” ~ Peter Murphy
- “Habit: A shackle for the free.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nihilism reminds us that we are not gods, and that despite all of the accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they possess only a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies.” ~ John Marmysz, Optimistic nihilism quotes
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“To think is to say ‘no.'” ~ Emile Chartier
- “Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.” ~ Ayelet Waldman
- “All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word “no.” To “no” there is only one answer and that is “yes.” Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.” ~ Robert McNamara
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“One cannot be a part-time nihilist.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat, it’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go!” ~ Brad Pitt, Nihilism quotes on controlling everything
- “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.” ~ Anonymous
- “Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestations of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.” ~ Eric Hoffer
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“Nihilism is best done by professionals.” ~ Iggy Pop
- “A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.” ~ Maria Montessori
- “The negative always wins at last, but I like it none the better for that.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “Show me a population that is deeply religious and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, … content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction.” ~ Hubert Harrison
- “Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger – even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all – and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.” ~ Ray Brassier
- “If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.” ~ Reginald Horace Blyth
- “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, Nihilism quotes technology
- “If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
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“If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.” ~ Ray Brassier, Existential nihilism quotes
- “The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.” ~ Irving Kristol
- “The saying “no self, no problem” probably comes from Zen. In their cultures, where Buddhism is kind of taken for granted, as well as karma, causality, former and future life, and the possibility for becoming enlightened, then it’s safe to skirt the danger of nihilism, which would be, I don’t exist because Buddha said I have no self, and therefore I have no problem because I don’t exist. That would be a bad misunderstanding. But in those cultures, it would not be as easy to have that understanding as it would be here in the west, where we really are nihilistic.” ~ Robert Thurman
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“Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they’re no longer alone.” ~ Gordon G. Chang
- “Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “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
- “The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don’t think most artists feel their work is meaningless.” ~ Leonard Baskin
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“[R]eligious concepts are parasitic upon moral intuitions.” ~ Pascal Boyer
- “The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing-Oh, make haste!” ~ Omar Khayyam
- “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
- “Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.” ~ Victor Hugo
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“That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the “meaningless”) eternally!” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.” ~ Allan Bloom
- “Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: “All that is worthless”–and want to create no value themselves.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice — the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.” ~ Wyndham Lewis
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“Inexpedient: Not calculated to advance one’s interests.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.” ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau”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 political goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence.” ~ Michael Ignatieff
- “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.” ~ Unknown
- “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
