Nietzsche for Creative Spirits
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Eternal Recurrence
...This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it...everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you
...The basic conception of this work [Zarathustra], the idea of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained
...The doctrine of the "eternal recurrence,"...might in the end have been taught already by Heraclitus. At least the Stoa has traces of it
from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, (trans. W. Kaufmann), 341
The greatest weight. 71— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
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from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, (trans. W. Kaufmann), p9 s1.I shall now tell the story of Zarathustra. The basic conception of this work, the idea of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained - belongs to the August of the year 1881
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from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, (trans. W. Kaufmann), p4 s3.I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy, those of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose proximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy, saying Yes to opposition and war, becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of "being"—all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. The doctrine of the "eternal recurrence," that is, of the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things - this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end have been taught already by Heraclitus. At least the Stoa has traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Heraclitus.
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