Eternal Return Quotes

“Good-bye and hello, as always.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

“The greatest weight.-- 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 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?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“When we gaze sympathetically at the human condition of our 'enemies' we rather lovingly, gaze, oh so briefly, at our true moral reflection. We edge and creep ever closer to that final jump into the abyss of moral ambiguity. The tears will stream with fury as you release those bound demons from within. Then, and only then, you will SOAR. I most certainly do not guarantee that you'll find it ANY better than walking, or even yet, crawling (the view is terrifying at first -- and the wings will shame you with ANGELIC glory!) but haven't you always wanted to FLY?
The prerequisites for flight are a growing of the mind's wings and the shedding of tremendous moral weight. Always inevitably, you will climb to view the entire landscape -- ascending with greater speed and pressure. And when the view of the abyss has squeezed every droplet of humanity from your heart-- when you bear and peer into the face of GOD -- I assure you, you will fall and tumble majestically through the mind's clouds, returning to homely feet, swaddled in terrible and gorgeous humanity, just as you always have, safe in bed, night-light beside, shining in the darkness.”
― Matthew Washburn

“They say if we forget the past, then we’re doomed to repeat it, but the word ‘doomed’ is a bit strong, I’d say. It’s just the eternal return. You’ve got to fall in love with Fate. Imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“The world repeats itself, but, whatever laws it might obey (if any), they are not such that the human mind can grasp or predict them. It is circular in the sense that it is not progressing (morally or scientifically) toward any goal but rather endlessly repeating an interaction of forces that we label good and evil in order to make sense of them. Not that the world cares about our labels. If our world can never be fully described by any law that humans can know, then we cannot be its masters, either intellectually or in practice.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness