"Nihilism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Danton and Robespiere concentrated in their intense natures the venom, the hate, and the desperation of the people—a more terrible triumvirate than the celebrated one which colored the Tiber with the patrician blood of Rome. The Nihilism of Russia is the outgrowth of monopoly in land and the consequent enslavement of the people by the aristocracy, beginning with the autocrat upon his throne. England has reached a transition period. The pressure of her population has become so intense, that the great producing classes can no longer ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Finland is by far the best-developed part of the empire; it stands on a higher plane than do the other provinces as regards every element of civilization; it has steadily been the most loyal of all the realms of the Czar. Nihilism and anarchism have never gained the slightest foothold; yet to-day there is nobody in the whole empire strong enough to prevent sundry bigots—military and ecclesiastical—leading the Emperor to violate his coronation ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that Europeans may exaggerate and misunderstand the doctrine by taking it as equivalent to a denial of the soul's immortality or of free will or to an affirmation that mind is a function of the body. The universality of the proposition really diminishes its apparent violence and nihilism. To say that some beings have a soul and others have not is a formidable proposition, but to say that absolutely no existing person or thing contains anything which can be called a self or soul is less revolutionary ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... or any member of the gentry a spiritual attitude and an outward bearing which in their best representatives has always commanded respect, an integrity that has always preserved its possessors, and in consequence Chinese society as a whole, from moral collapse, from spiritual nihilism, and has thus contributed to the preservation of Chinese cultural values in spite of all ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... no gods, no heaven, and no soul, is pleasure: 'While life remains let a man live happily; let him not go without butter (literally ghee) even though he run into debt,' etc.[1] Of sterner stuff was the man who invented a new religion as a solace for sorrow and a refuge from the nihilism in which ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Liberalism is, in fact, axiomatically hostile to the State. It is not 'little Englandism' that is the matter with those who still cling to such views; it is, as Huxley and Matthew Arnold correctly diagnosed, administrative Nihilism. So far as political action is concerned, they tend to be inveterately negative. They have hung up temperance reform and educational reform for a quarter of a century, because, instead of seeking to enable the citizen to refresh himself without being poisoned or inebriated and to get the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... unavoidable result of the Critique of Reason and foretold by; it as the Messiah was foretold by John the Baptist. And by the evil fruit we know the evil root: the idealistic theory is philosophical nihilism, for it denies the reality of the external world, as the materialism of Spinoza denies a transcendent God and the freedom of the will. Reality slips away from both these systems—they are the only consistent ones there are—material reality escaping from the former and suprasensible ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... by American dramatists. Another departure from the American atmosphere is in the case of Steele Mackaye; here in preference to "Hazel Kirke," I have selected "Paul Kauvar," farthest away from American life, inasmuch as it deals with Nihilism, but written at a time when there was a Nihilistic fever ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... of the teachings of this school is pure nihilism, or the non-existence of both self and of matter. There is an utter absence of substantiality in all things. Life itself is a prolonged dream. The objects about us are mere delusive shadows or mirage, the product of the imagination alone. The past and the future ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... for this state of affairs? Shall there be no more political parties, and shall we shatter the political machinery which, bad as it is, is far better than no machinery at all? Shall we embrace nihilism as our creed, because we have practical communism forced upon us as the consequence of jobbery, and the imposition ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... understand. All the characters in Punin and Baburin are so strongly drawn, so intensely alive, that, like Rembrandt's portraits, they make the living people, who stand looking at them, absurdly grey and lifeless by comparison! Baburin is a Nihilist before the times of Nihilism, he is a type of the strong characters that arose later in the movement of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... said: "politics, perhaps, nihilism, or perhaps again—love. There was one fact, or coincidence, worth noting: when Lady Beltham came home from the Transvaal after the war, during which, by the way, she did splendid work among the sick and wounded, she sailed by the same boat that was taking Gurn to England. Gurn ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... or retrogressive genius, which is imitative and which always enunciates dead and obsolete matter long since abandoned and thrown aside as being utterly useless. The doctrines of communism and of nihilism are the products of retrogressive genius and are clearly atavistic, inasmuch as they are a reversion to the mental habitudes of our savage ancestors. The doctrines of the matriarchate are likewise degenerate beliefs, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... frozen, Siberian mines, hung over this little band of youths by day and by night, sleeping and waking. He had fallen upon the very centre of the first students' brotherhood: an alliance formed a few years before, during that unique revolution of Russian youth which resulted in the birth of Nihilism. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... made men of us"—true; but now, so great has their influence become that "they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us." Hence "the beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes ... till they become transparent." The logical tendency of such teaching may seem to be towards utter nihilism. But that tendency is checked and qualified by the strong conservative element which is everywhere prominent in Carlyle's thought. Upon the absolute need of "clothes" the stress is again and again thrown. They "have made men of us." By symbols alone ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that if the testimony of consciousness is not accepted in all its integrity, we are necessarily involved in the Nihilism of Hume and Fichte; the phenomena of mind and matter are, on analysis, resolved into an absolute nothingness—"a play of phantasms in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... caused by the industrial conditions there. And the immigrant in coming to America brought with him all his grievances, political not less than industrial. He was too ignorant to discriminate; he could only feel. Anarchy and Nihilism, which were his natural reaction against his despotic oppressors in Germany and Russia, he went on cultivating here, where, by the simple process of naturalization, he became politically his own despot in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... are demanded from thought, what revolting hardness from feeling, what nonentities of ethical striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... object still more strongly to the anti-Puritans. Those rebels who make unconventionality their only convention, with their distrust of duty because they see no reason to be dutiful, and their philosophic nihilism, which comes to this, that all things having been proved false except their own desires, their desires become a philosophy, those anti-Puritans, as one sees them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an obstreperous, denying ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... they are going to blow as much of it as possible into what they call smithereens, and try to get justice from the smithereens. It is a new scheme they have hit upon, a kind of scientific experiment. The theory appears to be, that justice is the product of Nihilism plus public buildings blown up by dynamite, and that the more public buildings they blow up the more justice they will obtain. I hear that they have also started a company for supplying statesmen, and all public orators except Home Rulers, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... populations and to pour them westward like a dark movement of matter, in such cases it has been very common to compare the invasion to a plague of lice or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never before, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... have a distinct vital value. A man, too sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of futility. Either he will become a dilettante, which is the French way, or he will take to drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in Russian fiction. Bad manners have indeed a distinct ethical value. We all experience moods in which we politely assent to the thing that is not, because of the fatigue of fighting for the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... to point out once again that Anarchism and Nihilism have no more in common than Anarchism and Socialism. As Plechanoff said at the Zurich International Congress: "We (i.e., the Russians) have had to endure every form of persecution, every thinkable misery; ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... doctrine of nihilism, that is, the destruction of everything that constitutes society, penetrated into Russia by way of Germany. At first it was nothing but a theory, fascinating for (p. 235) young and inexperienced people such as students of the universities who, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.' To my fancy that savors strongly of nihilism, as ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... exists or which can be created within the next ten years in the educational system of these revolutionists at Paris, we are turning out at least a hundred applicants each year of each sex, who must necessarily be thrown upon the public. What will become of them? The young men will go into Nihilism, as young men of the same sort do in Russia; the young women will go upon the street. Only the other day at Paris, the Government advertised a competition for about 70 positions in the telegraphic service. How many young women applied? More than 800! What is to become of the 730 unsuccessful competitors? ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... may not be well that the War has modified our estimate of the value of life; but it is a bad thing for the legitimate drama. And in the case of Fedora the bloody regime of LENIN has so paled our memory of the terrors of Nihilism that SARDOU'S play seems almost further away from us than the tragedy of Agamemnon. In our callous incapacity to be thrilled by the ancient horrors of forty years ago we fall back on the satisfaction to be got out of the author's dexterity in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... call it Nihilism," replied the Frenchman, with an inimitable gesture, conveying the fact that he was not the man ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... great solicitude, taxed to the utmost his fertile brain; and that was the rising and wide-spreading doctrines of Socialism,—which was to Germany what Nihilism is to Russia and Fenianism was to Ireland; based on discontent, unbelief, and desperate schemes of unpractical reform, leading to the assassination even of emperors themselves. How to deal with this terrible foe to all governments, all laws, and all institutions was a most perplexing question. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... short work of the revolutionary legend as of the monarchical one, and showed itself as pitiless for the rights of man as it had been for the rights of God. All these causes combined, sufficiently explain the nihilism and pessimism which invaded the souls of the young during the past ten years.... Clear-sighted boys analyzed life with a vigor and a precision unknown to their predecessors; having analyzed it, they found it bad; they turned away from life with fear and horror. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... belief in a divine personality has ceased to have any longer a meaning; yet they are satisfied that the end of all is not here, but that something still remains to us, 'and some better thing for the good than for the evil.' They are persuaded, in spite of their theological nihilism, that the ideas of justice and truth and holiness and love are realities. They cherish an enthusiastic devotion to the first principles of morality. Through these they see, or seem to see, darkly, and in a figure, that the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... relativity in morality, and declares all morality to be a mere means to power. Needless to say that verses 9, 10, 11, and 12 refer to the Greeks, the Persians, the Jews, and the Germans respectively. In the penultimate verse he makes known his discovery concerning the root of modern Nihilism and indifference,—i.e., that modern man has no goal, no aim, no ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... greatest periods of art naturalism is not predominant. Its constantly working tendency is kept in check by noble ideas and noble style. There is in the development of sculpture a constant approach to nature, but nothing of the nihilism which looks on all aspects of nature as equally fit subjects for art. The artists of the pediments of Aegina could not bring themselves to conceal the beautiful bodies of the fighting warriors by rigid armour like that ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the French police, on account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier Latin—young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism. In London he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed leaflets that she kept ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
