100+ Best Nihilism Quotes - Uplift Life Quotes

Nihilism Quotes are quotes about nothingness. Here, we listed almost 100+ best optimistic nihilism quotes.

Table of Contents

Existential nihilism quotes

1. “Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.” -E. M. Cioran

2. “Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deal with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. ” -Martin Luther King, Jr. (nihilism quotes)

“All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

4. “I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

5. “The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.” -Paul Kurtz

6. “Nihilists embrace life’s existence by the acceptance of nothingness.” -Martijn Budel (nihilism quotes)

7. “The skeptic may deny your doctrine or attack your church but he cannot honestly ignore the fact that your life has been changed.” -Charles R. Swindoll

8. “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

9. “The negative always wins at last, but I like it none the better for that.” -Mason Cooley

10. “Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they’re no longer alone.” -Gordon G. Chang

11. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” ― Samuel Beckett

Optimistic nihilism quotes

12. “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 (nihilism quotes)

13. “Man was the 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, Catch-22

14. “Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.” -Ray Brassier

15. “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

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, The Rebel

17. “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

18. “But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.” ― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

19. “Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

20. “If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (nihilism quotes)

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

25.

“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

26. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.” -Albert Camus

27. “Like other lifeforms, we [humans] exist only to replicate ourselves.” -George Monbiot

28. “To think is to say ‘no.’ -Emile Chartier(nihilism quotes)

29. “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” -Albert Camus

30. “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. This implies a constant exercise of due diligence.” – Michael Ignatieff

Nihilist quote

31. “A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.” -Albert Camus

32. “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

33. “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(nihilism quotes)

34.

“Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something. ” -Dennis Prager

35. “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” -Mikhail Bakunin

36. “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

37. “Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they’re no longer alone.” -Gordon G. Chang(nihilism quotes)

38. “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

39. “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(nihilism quotes)

40. “Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.” -Ayelet Waldman (nihilism quotes)

41. “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

Quotes about Nihilism

42. “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 (nihilism quotes)

43. “The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.” -Naomi Klein

44. “All roads are blocked to a philosophy that 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

45. “What can be broken, should be broken.” -Dmitry Pisarev

46. “Say what you want about the deaf.” -Jimmy Carr (nihilism quotes)

47. “Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.” -Dean Ornish (nihilism quotes)

48. “I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don’t think most artists feel their work is meaningless.” -Leonard Baskin

49. “Why do we argue? Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.” ― Alan Moore, Watchmen (nihilism quotes)

50. “The point is there ain’t no point.” -Cormac McCarthy

51. “Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.” -David Foster Wallace (nihilism quotes)

52. “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.” -Robert McNamara

53. “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, The Collector (nihilism quotes)

54. “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 (nihilism quotes)

55. “If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.” -Reginald Horace Blyth

56. “That’s how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

57. “Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.” -Susan Sontag (nihilism quotes)

58. “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

59. “One cannot be a part-time nihilist.” -Albert Camus

60. “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, The Cornel West Reader (nihilism quotes)

61. “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

62. “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 (nihilism quotes)

63. “The problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.” -John Green

64. “That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the “meaningless”) eternally!” -Friedrich Nietzsche

65. “The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foothold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.” – Albert Camus (nihilism quotes)

66. “Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat, it’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go!” -Brad Pitt

67. “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 (nihilism quotes)

68. “Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of a people crushed under an iron rule.” -Wendell Phillips

69. “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, Less Than Zero

70.

“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)

Nihilist quotes big lebowski

71. “There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.” -Rebecca Solnit

72. “Nihilism is best done by professionals.” -Iggy Pop (nihilism quotes)

73. “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 (nihilism quotes)

74. “Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!” -Mikhail Bakunin

75. “Alongside intellectual disgust develops another, deeper and more dangerous: emanating from the viscera, it ends at the severest form of nihilism, the nihilism of repletion.” -E.M. Cioran

80. “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 manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.” -Eric Hoffer

81. “We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

82. “It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm them – I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them from.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (nihilism quotes)

83. “I had passed from nihilism to the Church simply because I felt it to be impossible to live without religion, that is, without a knowledge of good and evil beyond the animal instincts.” -Leo Tolstoy

84. “The drive toward nihilism is invidious, and it adds a substantial layer of risk to the financial world and markets.’— ‘More Mania in the Markets.’ -Zachary Karabell

85. “A great deal of time and intellectual force is lost in the world because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.” -Maria Montessori

86. “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 (nihilism quotes)

87. “Which other major religion is based on the Godhead incarnate being whipped, tacked to a cross, stabbed? Only the Marquis de Sade could have made up a sicker religion. It’s no wonder that those brought up in such a culture hate life and enjoy inflicting pain. All societies are sick but some are sicker than others. Christian societies are certainly the sickest.” -Gore Vidal

88. “Christian theology is a hair’s breadth away from nihilism.” -John Milbank

89. “Yes, you may be a pessimist or a nihilist, but only in thought— a nihilist at a distance, a pessimist at arm’s length.” -Le Monde

90. “There must be somebody there, because somebody must have said Nobody.” -A.A. Milne

91.

“You don’t realize all the things you have in this world, much more than you need, and you do much less than you can.” -Roberto Canessa

92. “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.” -Gorgias (nihilism quotes)

93.“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

94. “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

95. “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

96. “I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women (nihilism quotes)

97. “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

98. “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, Imperial Bedrooms

99. “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.” -Carl Sagan (nihilism quotes)

100. “I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn’t the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

101. “Nihilism, there’s really nothing to it.” -Dean Cavanagh

102. “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, The Will to Power (nihilism quotes)

103. “Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.” -Ryan Gosling

FAQ on “Nihilism Quotes”

What is the motto of nihilism?

The word “impossible” means “everything.” Athletics, workouts, and sweat are all a waste of time.

Is it possible that Buddha was a nihilist?

In the western sense of the word, Buddha was not a nihilist. In terms of spirituality, however, his thought is classified as soonyavad (nihilism).

Who is a well-known nihilist?

Friedrich Nietzsche (German: Friedrich Nietzsche) was a
Friedrich Nietzsche is the philosopher most typically linked with nihilism. There is no objective order or structure in the world, according to Nietzsche, except what we give it. The nihilist realises that all values are baseless and that reason is powerless after penetrating the facades that support convictions.