#nihilism

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

#church #nihilism #philosophy #theology #logic

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #ernst-jünger #history #nihilism #time

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness? ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#fear #nihilism #paranoia #imagination

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

#nihilism #philosphy #existentialism

The idea that we are to be absorbed into the Deity is Gnostic in its origins and is quite antithetical to Christianity." ~R. Alan Woods [2006] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#christianity #gnosticism #nihilism #r-alan-woods #r-alan-woods

I can't go on, I'll go on. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#drama #existentialism #fiction #humor #nihilism

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#nihilism #philosophy #post-modernism #reality #truth

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

#philosophy #men

Though violent action is sometimes associated with nihilism, what makes such activity nihilistic, it seems, is the belief that ultimately nothing will come out of it. When nihlists throw themselves into activity it is with the understanding that its only goal is the expression and dissipation of their life's energy. Any creative product will eventually be consumed by decay. Since there is nothing that humans can do to mend the separation between themselves and reality, they can never actualize their supreme standards of worth and value. This world must remain substandard no matter what we do to try and change the situation. ↗

— John Marmysz

#violence-and-nihilism #change

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. ↗

— Alain Badiou

#contrary #destructive #good #humanity #liberal