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Nihilist Quotes

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Nihilist Quotes

“The new teaching refrains from laying a foundation; for the new educator, as revolutionary, is a destroyer who seeks to annihilate everything. He seeks to eradicate the past, to eradicate man and woman, to eradicate the parent, to eradicate both the nation and the patriot – and finally, to eradicate God. This is the work of today’s education. It is a work of disorganization, disintegration, and hatred. The revolutionary seeks a blank canvass upon which to paint in whatever color he chooses. The chosen color, of course, will be red. Those countries already submerged by the nihilist dictators are arming themselves. They are getting ready to unleash a wider destruction. Like all psychopaths they are motivated to find victims wherever they can. The consumption of victims is their mode of self-affirmation.”

TeachersPsychopathsNihilist
Author:J.R.Nyquist
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“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no brick and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself.”

IdentityIronyPathosNihilistNihilistic
Book:Open Boat
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“You can say whatever you like to me. I make no moral judgments." Cassandra was slow to reply, momentarily distracted by his eyes. They were blue with dapples of brilliant green around the pupils, but one eye had far more green than the other. "Everyone makes judgments," she said in response to his statement. "I don't. My sense of rights and wrong is different from most people's. You could say I'm a moral nihilist." "What's that?" "Someone who believes nothing is innately right or wrong." "Oh, that's dreadful," she exclaimed. "I know," he said, looking apologetic. Perhaps some gently bred young women would have been shocked, but Cassandra was accustomed to unconventional people. She'd grown up with Pandora, whose twisty-turny, hippy-hoppity brain had enlivened an unbearably secluded life. In fact, Mr. Severin possessed a kind of contained energy that reminded her a little of Pandora. One could see it in the eyes, the quicksilver workings of a mind that ran faster than those of other people.”

UnconventionalNihilistPandora RavenelTom SeverinCassandra And TomNonjudgmental
Book:Chasing Cassandra
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“The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly. Instead of integrating death into life, he sees in it the only truth of the life, which appears to him as a disguised death. However, there is life, and the nihilist knows that he is alive. That’s where his failure lies. He rejects existence without managing to eliminate it. He denies any meaning to his transcendence, and yet he transcends himself. A man who delights in freedom can find an ally in the nihilist because they contest the serious world together, but he also sees in him an enemy insofar as the nihilist is a systematic rejection of the world and man, and if this rejection ends up in a positive desire destruction, it then establishes a tyranny which freedom must stand up against.”

PurposeMeaningExistentialismTranscendenceNihilismNihilist
Book:The Ethics of Ambiguity
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“Whereas a belief in an absurd world arises out of the fundamental disharmony of a person searching for meaning in an apparently meaninglessness universe, an existential nihilist displays impassive intellectual stoicism towards their eventual mortality while embracing a passionate artistic commitment to munity against the underlying syndrome of insignificance and confusion encasing life.”

StoicismNihilismStoicExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“From the shattered tools and bones of our predecessors, we craft our own weapons. Nothing is guaranteed to work, yet we attack regardless. We do so naked, having shed the rags of morality, ideology, and politics that had accumulated over time. We confront this world raw, in all its horrifying glory.”

InspirationalHorrorNihilist
Book:Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism
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“Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.”

MemoirWriters On WritingNihilismWriters QuotesMemoir WritingPersonal EssaysEssayistExistentialistNihilistExistential Angst
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“You can say whatever you like to me. I make no moral judgments." Cassandra was slow to reply, momentarily distracted by his eyes. They were blue with dapples of brilliant green around the pupils, but one eye had far more green than the other. "Everyone makes judgments," she said in response to his statement. "I don't. My sense of right and wrong is different from most people's. You could say I'm a moral nihilist." "What's that?" "Someone who believes nothing is innately right or wrong." "Oh, that's dreadful," she exclaimed. "I know," he said, looking apologetic. Perhaps some gently bred young women would have been shocked, but Cassandra was accustomed to unconventional people. She'd grown up with Pandora, whose twisty-turny, hippy-hoppity brain had enlivened an unbearably secluded life. In fact, Mr. Severin possessed a kind of contained energy that reminded her a little of Pandora. One could see it in the eyes, the quicksilver workings of a mind that ran faster than those of other people.”

UnconventionalNihilistPandora RavenelTom SeverinCassandra And TomNonjudgmental
Book:Chasing Cassandra
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“In a hypothetical future where all humans have been wiped out by a catastrophic event, but AI has advanced to the point where it can autonomously create and maintain robotic systems, what kind of world would emerge? Would the AI continue to evolve and run a machine-driven society, or would it face an existential crisis, questioning its purpose without humans to serve? Could AI itself turn nihilistic, or would it find new meaning in a world devoid of human life? And taking this even further — what if humans, as we know them, were actually robots created by a long-extinct civilization? Perhaps, over time, we learned reproduction and invented the idea of biological existence, imagining our own purpose, unaware of our artificial origins.”

LifePhilosophyExistenceFutureMeaning Of LifeArtificial IntelligenceOrigin Of LifeNihilistAnupamism
Book:Global Cinematic Treasures: 101 Must-See Modern Films
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“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. ... Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous.”

ThinkingWorldReasonChristianPoliticalPartyLibertyBoysDangerousRepublicanTaxesGolfRadioDumbCorporateRacistPantsCheatEconomistBullyDeafConvenienceFundamentalistSwampsDevelopersFaith BasedMidgetNihilistMisanthropicSweatshopsTycoonsShills
Author:Garrison Keillor
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“The Buddha is your real body, your original mind. This mind has no form or characteristics, no cause or effect, no tendons or bones. It's like space. You can't hold it. It's not the mind of materialists or nihilists. If you don't see your own miraculously aware nature, you'll never find a Buddha, even if you break your body into atoms.”

IfsMindRealWisdomBodyFormCausesUnderstandingSpaceBreakEffectsOriginalsBonesYour BodyCharacteristicsAtomsNihilist
Book:The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma
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“I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.”

PeopleThinkingMenOpinionDangerousDangerStudentsProudActivityIntellectualMarxistNihilistDangerous Man
Book:Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
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“I am religious by nature, I'm not a nihilist. I don't follow, I don't even know what the tenets of things like deconstructionism are, and all those schools that come up and their way of looking at things that people strive to incorporate into what they write. I don't even know what they are. Because I sense from a distance that I don't want to know. And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility. Which is nihilistic, and ironic, detached, cool, and cowardly.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWayWantWritingSchoolReligiousViewsModernDistanceStriveCome UpPoint Of ViewIronicSensibilityCowardlyDetachedNihilist
Author:Mark Helprin
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“Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.”

ThinkingSometimesHelpingBraveCowardYou ChooseBe BraveMagnetHigher PowerBrainwashingNihilist
Author:Ottessa Moshfegh
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“Maybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.”

LongInspirationCapitalismGuiltInspiredVolunteerNihilist
Author:Momus
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“We had the city trying to demolish two of our exhibition spaces, which was at first pretty disturbing. But following the freak-out is the realization that an attachment to any kind of form is pointless. Forgive me if I seem like a complete nihilist, but if the demolition trucks show up and the buildings come down, then that just presents a new setting in which an artist can work. The real challenge is trying to conceal my delight in the process.”

TryingKindRealArtistChallengesBuildingForgivingRealizationTruckPointlessForgive MeNihilist
Author:Kirsha Kaechele
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“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

KnowsMindI CanEndsBodyRealityRememberMovingYoungSufferingFunctionTownsPhenomenonBereavementFundamentalistTenantsMoving OutNihilistTenements
Book:William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck
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“The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.”

PeopleWorldBelieveDoePurposeDiesLiteratureNovelStrangeProductsPagesRoseEnthusiasmCopiesMelancholyStakesMartyrPalacesAnticipatePuppetsMouldDebrisNihilist
Book:De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings
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“The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.”

MenEarthGrowsGoalDecisionHe ManOne DayIdealsBoundsAtheistBellsNothingnessStrokesNihilismNoonAntichristNauseaNihilist
Book:Basic Writings of Nietzsche
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“Westerners think that all that is negative and positive is only caused from outside of themselves. They materialize and externalize their experiences, never understanding the connection between outer and inner phenomena or interdependent phenomena, looking for explanations only from objects through nihilist habit instead of from the subjective experience of their own minds.”

ThinkingMindUnderstandingObjectsHabitNegativeConnectionsExplanationSubjectiveWesternersNihilistNegative And Positive
Author:Thinley Norbu
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