"Nihilism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now, and all contemporary scientific work consists in increasing these numbers. I saw through this trick when I discovered the 35,001-st and felt no satisfaction. Well, I had no time to suffer from disillusionment, as I was soon possessed by a new faith. I plunged into Nihilism, with its manifestoes, its 'black divisions,' and all the rest of it. I 'went to the people,' worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler. Afterwards, when wandering over Russia, I had a taste of Russian life, I turned into a fervent devotee of that life. I loved the ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Only that differentiation is progressive which results in new integrations and greater complexity of social relations." Comte's, and Fiske's, and Herbert Spencer's statements of the same law are the same in substance, but too well known to quote here. So Professor Huxley in his "Administrative Nihilism," Henry George in "Social Problems," and indeed pretty much everybody who touches the subject, except Mr. Savage. He, however, has the grace to admit that "The world began in Socialism,"—and, by the law referred to, it will continue in an ever-enlarging, integrating Socialism, till the rise of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... cannot possibly have been born in the house he has himself built. On the other hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... hypotheses. As the arches of the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power amid that solitude, produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the huge fabric of the Lucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism, inspires a sense of terror, not so much on its own account as for the Roman sternness of the mind that made it. 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces immenses voutes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avait baties. Je me perdais comme ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Nihilists. You are quite wrong, excellency, if you think that your presence will intimidate them; nothing intimidates them. Educated men, learned men even, are to be found among Nihilists; these go further, in that they are men of action. The movement is, properly speaking, a derivative from Nihilism—though they are only known indirectly, and by hearsay, for they never advertise their doings in the papers. They go straight to the point. For them, it is not a question of showing that Pushkin is stupid, or that Russia must be torn in pieces. No; but if they have a great desire for anything, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that name, but probably the members would not care to repudiate the title, or deny that they were Nihilists theoretically—that is, if Nihilism means an absolute social and political overturning in order that something better may be built up. And, indeed, if you see what a hopeless tangle our present situation is, where else ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... elements of the two worst societies in Europe are concentrating in New York, and that unless rigorous measures are taken to keep them down, America will harbor graver dangers than any it has yet known. Russian nihilism, Polish anarchism, German socialism may join hands with the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra to institute a criminal organization such as the world has never seen before. There are enough ignorant immigrants to yield to a wave of fear, and the ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 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
... work of the secret society known as the Nihilists. To say that their association was secret is equivalent to saying that we know nothing of their purposes other than their name and their deeds indicate. Nihilism signifies nothingness. It comes from the same root as annihilate, and annihilation of despots appears to have been the Nihilist theory of obtaining political rights. This society reached its culmination in the reign of Alexander II., and, despite the fact ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Disciples of Charcot explained his scores—though not one had been published—while the neo-moralists gladly denounced him as a follower of the Master Immoralist, a sublimated emotional expression of the ethical nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Others, more fanciful, saw in his advent and in his art an attempt to overturn nations, life itself, through the agency of corrupting beauty and by the arousing of illimitable desires. Color and music, sweetness and soft luxuries, declared these modern followers of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... lasting for several years. The Poles, too, felt the oppressive hand of Pobiedonostzev. The latter was mastered by the Slavophil philosophy that the revolutionary unrest in Russia was traceable to the diversity of races, languages, and religions. He believed that Nihilism, Anarchism, and Socialism flourished because the people were cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic in experience and feeling, and that peace and stability could come only from the persistent and vigorous development of the three principles of Nationality, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... he 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
... him to Petersburg when he went on official business, and we remained there nearly a month," the narrative went on. "While there I received a secret message from 'The Red Priest,' the unseen and unknown power of Nihilism, who has for so many years baffled the police. I went to see him, and he revealed to me how Oberg had contrived to have my mother banished upon a false charge. He warned me against the man who had pretended to be my father's friend, and also told me that he had known my ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... the burdens and irritation 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
... readers. It did what hardly any previous book on philosophy ever did—it made philosophy readable, reasonable, lively, almost as exciting as a good novel. Learners who had been tortured over dismal homilies on the pantheism of Spinoza, and yet more dismal expositions of the pan-nihilism of Hegel, seized with eagerness upon a little book which gave an intense reality to Spinoza and his thoughts, which threw Hegel's contradictories into epigrams, and made the course of philosophic thought unfold itself naturally ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... him 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence—pity ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... tried to rob them while she was restoring them. For her own hand she would have wrecked the Restoration with the Revolution. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she had not the star of one solitary ideal to light the night of her nihilism. ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton |
