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Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive.

— Keiji Nishitani The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990)

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More quotes by Keiji Nishitani

In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism, demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process.

People give names to persons and things, and then suppose that if they know the names, they know that which the names refer to.

Religion and Nothingness (1983)

Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990)

A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990)

Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna.

The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Keiji Nishitani (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.