#recurrence

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 ... ' 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.' ... 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. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#recurrence #life

I am leaving because I have to fight simultaneously a potential recurrence of cancer the Democratic leadership, a health care bill that's going to destroy this country, my opposition to it and a belief that my party has become what it became - what it campaigned against. ↗

— Eric Massa

#am #became #because #become #belief

We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence. ↗

— Rene Cassin

#fought #had #led #lessons #men

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

#the-eternal-recurrence #love

Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence. ↗

— Ned Rorem

#artist #blaze #day #divine #each

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

#nietzsche #recurrence #faith

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science