Nihilist Quotes

“A nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“It is just a simple question - ‘And then what?’ But its consequence? Manifold!”
― Abhaidev, The World's Most Frustrated Man

“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.”
― Stephen Crane, Open Boat

“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.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“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.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“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.”
― serafinski, Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism

“All nihilists have wrestled with God. One more proof of his kinship with nothingness. After you have trampled everything underfoot, his is the last bastion of nothingness left.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

“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.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“At last he had risen to hold forth tragically about the misfortune that it was to be alive.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Then the doctor, a young man, not quite a Nihilist perhaps, but you know, eats with his knife...but a very good doctor.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“If it is your right to spread your Religions, I have every right to expose your vulture religions.

F**K RELIGIONS!”
― Anupam S Shlok

“This horde of rubes strolled into Tokyo thinking it holds hope and possibility!! They totally believe they're gonna be respectable human beings!! But in mere months, all these scumbags will run dry of confidence and hope and become broken wrecks whining incessantly on twitter!!”
― Inio Asano, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, Vol. 4

“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.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Why suffering has been my only friend?, maybe I am suffering and have mistaken it as my friend.”
― Azam palal...

“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.”
― Anupam S. Shlok, Global Cinematic Treasures: 101 Must-See Modern Films