ex nihilo
Meaning
ex nihilo
Arriving from or out of nothing.
Related terms
Examples
By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
That Homeric epic and the earliest Hebrew poetry were the results of long and rich developments should have been apparent to anyone who realizes that artistic perfection is never created ex nihilo.
The incorporation of... earlier sources does not mean that the Pentateuch or Former Prophets is the work of an editor who pasted together various docuements. Once we view the work as a whole, we see that it is a fresh creation though not a creatio ex nihilo.
Only God creates ex nihilo. Humans can only create out of something that already exists, which means there has to be an earlier destruction phase.