The following are (nihilistic) quotes that have inspired me, coming from different books I’ve read and enjoyed. They explore that ominous possibility that life is nothing more than a field of confusion and mystery. Regardless of their validity they are, in themselves, poetic views of the universe and expressions of the insatiability of the soul. They represent a growing trend amongst the newer generations that have been ‘wrestling with nihilism’ and the meaninglessness of a mechanical society.  Ultimately, they can be viewed as lamentations of an existence that does not gives us any clear and distinct answer, and thus, the calling that we must stay afloat, somehow,  in a metaphysically-impoverished time.

Quotes of Nihilism:

Norman O. Brown, Life against death (the psychoanalytical meaning of history):

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.

The Faustian restlessness of man in history shows that men are not satisfied by the satisfaction of their conscious desires; men are unconscious of their real desires.

Stanislav Grof, Realms of the human unconscious:

Existence appears not only nonsensical but monstrous and absurd, and the search for any meaning in life completely futile and, a priori, doomed to failure. People are seen as thrown into this world without any choice as to whether, where, when, and to whom they are to be born. The only certainty in life appears to be the fact that its duration is limited and that it will end. The fact of human mortality and the impermanence of all things is seen as Damocles’ sword hanging over us during every minute of our lives and annihilating any hope that anything has meaning.

Another important dimension of the “no exit” situation is the feeling of pervading insanity; subjects typically feel that they have lost all mental control and become permanently psychotic, or that they have gained the ultimate insight into the absurdity of the universe and will never be able to return to the merciful self-deception that is a necessary prerequisite f0r sanity.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms:

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.

We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives; we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it, since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightning-flash momentarily illumination the night….
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J. P. Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne:

For the first time he had felt fear about life, for the first time he had truly understood that when life had sentenced you to suffer, this sentence was neither a pretense nor a threat. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks — in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for your yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion — so that he wouldn’t be able to invent it, but so that it would invent *him*…. it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly insignificant.

She would be confused by torment and pain and seek a deadening solace by throwing herself to the floor like an inanimate object, too full of hideous rottenness and dregs, a carcass of herself, too repulsive to be the seat of a soul… gradually a harsh, brutal indifference came over her, and she stopped despairing just as she had stopped hoping.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal:

To use language is to limit onself to the modes of perception already inherent in that language.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch:

          You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End…. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative….

 Henry David Thoreau, WALDEN:

          The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation… A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

E.M. Cioran, On the heights of despair:

           I too have a hope: a hope for absolute forgetfulness. But is it hope or despair?

       I am not proud to be a man, because I know only too well what it is to be a man.

       One should not forget that philosophy is the art of masking inner tormets.

       Universal category and form become illusory and irrelevant when confronted with the irreversible annihilation of death.

       My tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

       Isn’t music the art which best expresses infinity because it dissolves all forms into a charmingly ineffable fluidity?

       Men gnerally work too much to be themselves.

       Though fully aware that the source of unhappiness is in us, we nevertheless turn a personal defect into a metaphysical deficiency.  (!!)

      Man has forgotten the meaning of silence.

      Whether you suffer or not, nothingness will swallow you forever… nothing created by man will endure.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations:

All that you see will soon perish; those who witness this perishing will soon perish themselves. Die in extreme old age or die before your time – it will all be the same.

Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (non-fiction):

‘…appearances and all outer and inner phenomena, which arise like diverse reflections in a mirror, are nothing more than radiant manifestations of emptiness which have no instrinsic self-nature, there is nothing one should consider to really exist.

Saul Bellow, Seize the Day:

The spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a hump. In any moment of quiet, when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about.
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He could be both sane and crazy. In these days nobody can tell for sure which is which.
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Why do people just naturally assume that you’ll know what they’re talking about?
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Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground:

I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness – a real thorough-going illness.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair:

All is dark, all is dreadful, and I do not see any special reason for my lingering in the dark, vainly invented world.

Sean Scully, Resistance and Persistence (Rothko, Bodies of Light):

Rather, I think the sight confirmed what he already knew: that the edges of the world and everything in it are blurred by mystery and sadness.

Eugene O’neill, The Iceman Cometh:

I saw men didn’t want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they’d have to give up greed, and they’ll never pay that price for liberty. So I said to the world, God bless all here, and may the best man win and die of gluttony!

Protagoras:

With regard to the gods, I cannot know either that they are or that they are not, or what they are like in figure, for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.

Knut Hamsun, Hunger:

I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep.

Charles Bukowski, Septuagenarian Stew:

Harry glanced at the drivers of the cars. They seemed unhappy. The world was unhappy. People were in the dark. People were terrified and disappointed. People were caught in traps. People were defensive and frantic. They felt as if their lives were being wasted. And they were right.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying:

we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the end of the night:

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

Juan Valera, a letter to Ruben Darío:

Hoy priva el empeño de que no haya ni metafísica ni religión. El abismo de lo incognoscible queda así descubierto y abierto, y nos trae y nos da vértigo, y nos comunica el impulso, a veces irresistible, de arrojarnos en él.

A very loose translation:
Today we’ve become destitute by the fact that there is no longer metaphysics or religion. The abyss of the incomprehensible becomes then discovered and open; and it attracts us and gives us vertigo, and transmits that impulse, sometimes irresistible, of diving into it.

Fernando Pessoa, A factless autobiography:

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought :

There is much in being that man cannot master. There is but little that comes to be known. What is known remains inexact, what is mastered insecure.

Fernando Pessoa, The Keeper of Herds:

I have no ambitions nor desires.To be a poet is not my ambition,It’s simply my way of being alone.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints:

All nihilists have wrestled with God.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death:

Man’s very insides– his self– are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange.

What would the average man do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness.

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