Eternal Recurrence/Quotes

The greatest weight - What if, during any day or night, a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest of loneliness and say 'This life, as you are now living it and have lived it, you must once again and eternal times more live; and it will be nothing new, only the previous hurt and the previous wants and every thought and every sigh and every unspeakable greatness and smallness of your life must come by you again and all with the same arrangement and consequence, and even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this instant and myself. The eternal sand clock of yourself will again be inverted - and you with it, speck of specks!' - will you not throw yourself and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who so spoke? Or will you have experienced a tremendous moment, after which you answer him 'you are a God and I've never heard anything so Godly!' When this thought overcomes you, it will transform and perhaps crush you; the eternal question in each and every thing of 'Do you want this once more and again uncountable times?' will lie like the greatest weight on your actions! Or how well-disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more than these last eternal confirmations and validations?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I come again, with this Sun, with this Earth, with this Eagle, with this Serpent, not to a new Life, or a better Life, or an akin Life:
I come again eternally to this identical and same Life, in the Greatest and also in the Smallest, that I will teach again the Eternal Return of all things

that I will again speak the word of the great Midday of Earth and Man, that I will announce again to men the Ãœbermensch.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra

I want to tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, but we K-Paxians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, and it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, and again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.

—prot, K-PAX

The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the third age by some, an Age yet to come, an age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

—Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But rest assured: this will be the sixth time we have destroyed [Zion], and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

—The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

Our studies of past ages led us to believe that time is cyclical. Many patterns repeat. The same peaks of evolution, the same values of dissolution. The same conflicts are expressed in every cycle, but in a different manner. The repetition is too prevalent to be merely chance.

— Vendetta, Mass Effect 3