Nietzsche Eternal Recurrence Quotes

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eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.
Irvin D. Yalom (When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession)
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do … I read Socrates. This guy knocked off little Greek boys. What the Hell’s he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it. And Freud, another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.
Woody Allen
Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity.
Irvin D. Yalom (When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession)
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power)
But is eternity an alternative to life? Isn't it, on the contrary, the case that it is when one wants everything to be eternal that one most loves life and the world.
Alexander Nehamas
Few things in life are certain, and one of them is that you can turn on the television at three in the morning and someone will be singing and dancing on the Indian channel. Proof of Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence.
Jessica Zafra (Chicken Pox for the Soul)
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution — his attempted overcoming of nihilism — consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such — all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time's. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.
Ray Brassier (Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction)
Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, — a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things: — and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra, sometimes translated Thus Spake Zarathustra), subtitled A Book for All and None (Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen), is a written work by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Overman, which were first introduced in The Gay Science. Described by Nietzsche himself as "the deepest ever written", the book is a dense and esoteric treatise on philosophy and morality, featuring as protagonist a fictionalized Zarathustra. A central irony of the text is that the style of the Bible is used by Nietzsche to present ideas of his which fundamentally oppose Judaeo-Christian morality and tradition.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
The Dream of a Queer Fellow I write the words again and they appear doubly pregnant with meaning. It is a true and terrible phrase : true, because we are all queer fellows dreaming ; and we are queer just because we dream ; terrible, because of the vastness of the unknown which it carries within itself, because it sets loose the tremendous and awful question : What if we are only queer fellows dreaming ? What if behind the veil the truth is leering and jeering at our queerness and our dreams? What if the queer fellow of the story were right, before he dreamed ? What if it were really all the same? What if it were all the same not once but a million times, life after life, world after world, the same pain, the same doubt, the same dreams? The queer fellow went but one day's journey along the eternal recurrence which threatens human minds and human destinies. When he returned he was queer. There was another man went the same journey. Friedrich Nietzsche dreamed this very dream in the mountains of the Engadine. When he returned he too was queer.
John Middleton Murry (Fyodor Dostoevsky: a Critical Study)
No wonder Nietzsche calls Eternal Recurrence “the heaviest burden.” Nothing is weightier than eternity. If everything recurs infinitely, then there are no light moments, no trivial ones. Every moment, no matter how inconsequential, possesses the same weight and mass as others. “All actions are equally great and small.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus - I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No greater affirmation of life is possible than to wish every part of it to return to you forever. It is the sublime moment when a person can look at his life, no matter what it consists of – good, bad, or indifferent – and find within himself the desire never to be freed from any aspect of it that allows a human being to be transformed into an Übermensch, the supreme life affirmer.
Michael Faust
1. The thought of eternal recurrence: its first principles which must necessarily be true if it were true. What its result is. 2. It is the most oppressive thought: its probable results, provided it be not prevented, that is to say, provided all values be not transvalued. 3. The means of enduring it: the transvaluation of all values. Pleasure no longer to be found in certainty, but in uncertainty; no longer 'cause and effect,' but continual creativeness; no longer the will to self-preservation, but to power; no longer the modest expression 'it is all only subjective,' but 'it is all our work! let us be proud of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power)
Woe entreats: Go! Away, woe! But all that suffers wants to live, that it may become ripe and joyous and longing- longing for what is farther, higher, brighter. "I want heirs"- thus speaks all that suffers; "I want children; I do not want myself". Joy, however, does not want heirs, or children- joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dionysus versus 'Christ'; here you have the contrast. It is not a difference in regard to the martyrdom, — but the latter has a different meaning. Life itself — Life’s eternal fruitfulness and recurrence caused anguish, destruction, and the will to annihilation. In the other case, the suffering of the 'Christ as the Innocent One' stands as an objection against Life, it is the formula of Life’s condemnation. — Readers will guess that the problem concerns the meaning of suffering; whether a Christian or a tragic meaning is given to it. In the first case it is the road to a holy type of existence; in the second case existence itself is regarded as sufficiently holy to justify an enormous amount of suffering. The tragic man says yes even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor, and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it; — Dionysus cut into pieces is a promise of Life: it will be forever born anew and rise afresh from destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power)
Dionysus versus the 'Crucified': there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom — it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering —the 'Crucified as the innocent one'— counts as an objection to this life, as a formula to its condemnation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The saying of yea to life, including even its most strange and most terrible problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibleness in the sacrifice of its highest types - this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one's self of a dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence — this is how Aristotle understood it — but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself — that lust which also involves the lust of destruction. And with this I once more come into touch with the spot from which I once set out — the Birth of Tragedy was my first transvaluation of all values: with this I again take my stand upon the soil from out of which my will and my capacity spring — I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the prophet of eternal recurrence.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols)
Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds, and, and in the end, none of 'em knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do. Ss--I read Socrates. You know, n-nn--, this guy used to kn-knock off little Greek boys. What the hell's he got to teach me? And, and Nietzsche with his, with his Theory of Eternal Recurrence. He said that the life we live, we're gonna live over and over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. (MORE) MICKEY (V.O.) (CONT'D) That means I, uh, I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. Tch. It's not worth it. The movie next cuts to a sunny day in Central Park. A male jogger, seen through some tree branches, runs by. The camera moves past him, revealing a pondering Mickey walking by the reservoir. He continues to talk over the screen. MICKEY (V.O.) And, and Freud, another great pessimist. Jeez, I was in analysis for years. Nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated. The guy finally put in a salad bar.
Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters)
Rather than looking towards distant unknown bliss and blessings and reprieves, simply live in such a way that we would want to live again and want to live that way for eternity!–Our task steps up to us at every moment’ (W 9: 11 [161]). The beauty of this idea is that while the prospect of eternal recurrence prompts one to substitute for mindless activity, and acts performed solely out of a sense that they are socially required, things one genuinely wants to do, it prescribes no specific content. The choice is up to the individual in his or her loneliest loneliness.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand. Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain. Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?
R.F. Kuang (Katabasis)
And do ye know what “the universe” is to my mind? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity of energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller, which does not consume itself, but only alters its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it is a household without either losses or gains, but likewise without increase and without sources of revenue, surrounded by nonentity as by a frontier. It is nothing vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into infinity; but is a definite quantum of energy located in limited space, and not in space which would be anywhere empty. It is rather energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves, at the same time one and many, agglomerating here and diminishing there, a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing, for ever rolling back over incalculable ages to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, producing the most complicated things out of the most simple structures; producing the most ardent, most savage, and most contradictory things out of the quietest, most rigid, and most frozen material, and then returning from multifariousness to uniformity, from the play of contradictions back into the delight of consonance, saying yea unto itself, even in this homogeneity of its courses and ages; for ever blessing itself as something which recurs for all eternity, — a becoming which knows not satiety, or disgust, or weariness: — this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my “Beyond Good and Evil,” without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself, — would you have a name for my world? A solution of all your riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most
Friedrich Nietzsche (Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche)
Whenever I seek the deepest contrast to me, the incalculable baseness of the instincts, I always find my mother and sister — to believe that I am related to such riff-raff would be a blasphemy against my divinity. The treatment I have experienced at the hands of my mother and sister, up until this very moment, introduces in me unspeakable horror: here there is at work a perfect hell machine that, with impeccable accuracy, picks the very moment at which it can inflict a bloody wound, at my highest moments, . . . since then every power is lacking to defend oneself against such a poisonous worm . . . the physiological contiguity makes possible such a pre-established disharmony . . . But I confess that the deepest objection to the 'eternal recurrence,' my most terrible thought, is always my mother and my sister.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nevertheless, to learn right away something new from the same example, how fleeting and weak, how imprecise that comparison would be! If the comparison is to carry out this powerful effect, how much of the difference will be missed in the process. How forcefully must the individuality of the past be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of the correspondence! In fact, basically something that once was possible could appear possible a second time only if the Pythagoreans were correct in thinking that with the same constellations of the celestial bodies the same phenomena on the Earth had to repeat themselves, even in the small single particulars, so that when the stars have a certain position relative to each other, a Stoic and an Epicurean will, in an eternal recurrence, unite and assassinate Caesar, and with another stellar position Columbus will eternally rediscover America.
Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life)
I have the right to regard myself as the first tragic philosopher — that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher. Before my time no such thing existed as this translation of the Dionysian phenomenon into philosophic emotion: tragic wisdom was lacking; in vain have I sought for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy — those belonging to the two centuries before Socrates. I still remained a little doubtful about Heraclitus, in whose presence, alone, I felt warmer and more at ease than anywhere else. The yea-saying to the impermanence and annihilation of things, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; the yea-saying to contradiction and war, the postulation of Becoming, together with the radical rejection even of the concept Being — in all these things, at all events, I must recognise him who has come nearest to me in thought hither to. The doctrine of the "Eternal Recurrence" — that is to say, of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things in periodical cycles — this doctrine of Zarathustra's might, it is true, have been taught before. In any case, the Stoics, who derived nearly all their fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, show traces of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we have to escape from the eternal recurrence of our day-to-day lives. We have to try new things, learn new things, become people of wide interest rather than narrow focus. We should test our limits, not let limits define us. When a new day comes, we should feel as grateful as Bill Murray, the most overjoyed man on earth when he was able to break out of the prison of repetition.
Michael Faust (Nietzsche: The God of Groundhog Day)
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
Friedrich Nietzsche
The suggestion that eternal recurrence might be proved as a theorem of physics, rather than as a religious or philosophical doctrine, seems to have occurred at about the same time to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré. Nietzsche encountered the idea of recurrence on his studies of classical philology, and again in a book by Heine. It was not until 1881 that he began to take it seriously, however, and then he devoted several years to studying physics in order to find a scientific-sounding formulation of it. Poincaré on the other hand, was led to the subject by his attempts to complete Poisson's proof of the stability of the solar system, though he was also concerned with the difficulty of explaining irreversibility by mechanical models such as Helmholtz's monocyclic systems. Poincaré's theorem belongs to the history of theoretical physics, Nietzsche's speculations to the history of philosophical culture, and they are not usually discussed in the same context. Yet I find it necessary to consider them together since it was just at the end of the 19th century that developments in science were strongly coupled to the philosophical-cultural background. Both Nietzsche and Poincaré were trying, though in very different ways, to attack the "materialist" or "mechanist" view of the universe.
Stephen G. Brush (The kind of motion we call heat: A history of the kinetic theory of gases in the 19th century (Studies in statistical mechanics))
Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence is the only hypothesis that saves the concrete totality of the universe from death.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Some who preferred the clarity of science adhered to the ideas of Darwin, seeing at every turn the mark of natural selection; while others opted for Nietzsche and his eternal recurrence or Hegel and his dialectic—each system quite sensible, no doubt, when one had finally arrived at the one-thousandth page.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
It may take a very long time, but eventually two chess players will exhaust every possible combination of moves, play every possible game. The universe is, in a way, a large and complex game. Eventually everything repeats. Nietzsche’s belief, though, was just that: supposition propped up by ancient myths and fascinating but dubious statistical probabilities. Nietzsche never felt confident enough to publish his notes. Today most physicists dismiss Eternal Recurrence as more fiction than science.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
Nietzsche wanted to take the idea further. He wanted to convert Eternal Recurrence from myth to science. For days, weeks, he scribbled possible “proofs” on notepads. In one, he likens the universe to a pair of dice. There are only so many combinations possible. Eventually you’ll roll them all.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
How can he who has the harshest and most fearful, terrible grasp of reality and who has thought the most abysmal thoughts, nevertheless, avoids conceiving these things as objections to existence or even as objections to the eternal recurrence of existence? How is it that on the contrary, he finds reason for being himself, the eternal affirmation of all things, the tremendous and unbounded saying of Yea and Amen. Into every abyss, do I still bear the benediction of my affirmation to Life- but this once more is precisely the idea of Dionysos.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo/The Antichrist)
eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.
Yalom D. Irvin - And Nietzsche wept
And do ye know what "the universe" is to my mind? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity o; energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller, which does not consume itself, but only alters its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it is a household without either losses or gains, but likewise without increase and without sources of revenue, surrounded by nonentity as by a frontier, it is nothing vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into infinity; but it is a definite quantum of energy located in limited space, and not in space which would be anywhere empty. It is rather energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves, at the same time one and many, agglomerating here and diminishing there, a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing, for ever rolling back over in calculable ages to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, producing the most complicated things out of the most simple structures; producing the most ardent, most savage, and most contradictory things out of the quietest, most rigid, and most frozen material, and then returning from multifariousness to uniformity, from the play of contradictions back into the delight of consonance, saying yea unto itself, even in this homogeneity of its courses and ages; for ever blessing itself as something which recurs for all eternity,—a becoming which knows not satiety, or disgust, or weariness:—this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my "Beyond Good and Evil" without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself,—would you have a name for my world? A solution of all your riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most undaunted men of the blackest midnight?—This world is the Will to Power—and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides!
Friedrich Nietzsche
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
Friedrich Nietzsche
And do ye know what "the universe" is to my mind? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity of energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller, which does not consume itself, but only alters its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it is a household without either losses or gains, but likewise without increase and without sources of revenue, surrounded by nonentity as by a frontier, it is nothing vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into infinity; but it is a definite quantum of energy located in limited space, and not in space which would be anywhere empty. It is rather energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves, at the same time one and many, agglomerating here and diminishing there, a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing, for ever rolling back over in calculable ages to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, producing the most complicated things out of the most simple structures; producing the most ardent, most savage, and most contradictory things out of the quietest, most rigid, and most frozen material, and then returning from multifariousness to uniformity, from the play of contradictions back into the delight of consonance, saying yea unto itself, even in this homogeneity of its courses and ages; for ever blessing itself as something which recurs for all eternity,—a becoming which knows not satiety, or disgust, or weariness:—this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my "Beyond Good and Evil" without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself,—would you have a name for my world? A solution of all your riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most undaunted men of the blackest midnight?—This world is the Will to Power—and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—counts as an objection to life, as a formula for condemnation. One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering.... Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word “Dionysian” means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overfl owing into darker, fuller, more floating states; an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same, just as powerful, just as blissful, through all change; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The word “Dionysian” means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more floating states; an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same, just as powerful, just as blissful, through all change; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I then take the opportunity to ask him about the lemon rule and he laughs, tells me its quite simple: “You know how Nietzsche was all about creating your own morality and use your misfortune to learn from them? You know the tale of being hunted by the sleep paralysis demon and the eternal recurrence? To which he answered: Amor Fati, love your fate no matter what?” I nod. “Well I took the old saying, when life gives you lemons make lemonade and took it as an interpretation of his Amor Fati concept. That’s why we will all have a lemon with us tonight on the pub crawl. And if you lose it, in other words you hate your fate and are a nihilist, you have to drink.
Ryan Gelpke (Nietzsche’s Birthday Party: A Short Story Collection)
Eternal Recurrence
Friedrich Nietzsche
INFINITY IS IN THE INFINITE REBIRTHS OF THE UNIVERSE Every possible universe is different from all the rest. No new or reborn universe will be the same as the one before. The accidental nature of these rebirths shows how free will functions from the beginning of anything. It also shows that the world, which doesn’t only copy itself, is more interesting. The immaterial Primordial Being transforms itself in countless, infinite ways, allowing even the functioning and possible satisfaction of ethical laws on the absolute level. On the level of its potential, we may say that the world is “perfect,” yet we cannot foresee this perfection. Potentially, everything is part of everything else, and we can strive for the highest possible perfection in due “time.” The pain of one is the pain of all; the guilt of one is the guilt of all; the king is a bum at the same time. Every element makes the World and is the World. Everything is God, and the World is God. In this sense, everybody and everything is God. No bill will be unpaid. Justice and ethics of the Universe go beyond the human, Earthly concept of justice and ethics. Even Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, if it existed in reality, would not negatively affect the potential of the Absolute because of its absolute capacity to absorb, transform, and integrate all forms of life into its new manifestations and cycles.
Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
The eternal recurrence steps in at this point and manifests itself as a question: if life, in all of its details, "every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great" must return to you, what kind of life would you prefer to return to? Would you prefer to spend your present in resignation, so that each time it returns you would have to live in wretched complacency once again, made worse by how unsatisfactory it is, with the thought that you could have changed things for the better gnawing at you? Or would you prefer to live out your present in a tragic battle, struggling no matter how dim the light of hope is, and know that, even if you failed in the end, you are certain that you did all you could?
Jonas Čeika (How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century)