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Remorse.-- Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself:
remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of
stupidity a second.
from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow,s. 323, R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
The metaphysical comfort--with which, I am suggesting even
now, every true tragedy leaves us--that life is at the bottom
of things, despite all the changes of appearances,
indestructibly powerful and pleasurable--this comfort appears
in incarnate clarity in the chorus of the satyrs, a chorus of
natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all
civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the
changes of generations and of the history of nations.
from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy,s. 7, Walter Kauffman
transl.
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?
from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann
transl.
Plan for an unfinished book: The Eternal Recurrence
My philosophy brings the triumphant idea of which all other
modes of thought will ultimately perish. It is the great
cultivating idea: the races that cannot bear it stand
condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are chosen
to rule...
I want to teach the idea that gives many the right to erase
themselves - the great cultivating idea...
Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is
impossible! - Supposing we could judge value, what follows?
The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service
of strength (and barbarism!!)...
To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom
from morality; new means against the fact of pain ( pain
conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure...); the
enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a
counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the
concept of necessity; abolition of the "will"; abolition of
"knowledge-in-itself."
Greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as
he creates the overman.
from The Will to Power, s. 1053,1056,1058,1060,
Walter
Kaufmann transl.