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Full Idea
"Is this something I want to do countless times?" ....Let us etch the image of eternity onto our own lives! This thought embodies more than all religions, which taught us to disdain life as something ephemeral and to look toward an unspecified other life.
Gist of Idea
Reliving life countless times - this gives the value back to life which religion took away
Source
Friedrich Nietzsche (Works (refs to 8 vol Colli and Montinari) [1885], 9.496,503), quoted by Rüdiger Safranski - Nietzsche: a philosophical biography 10
Book Ref
Safranski,Rüdiger: 'Nietzsche: a philosophical biography' [Granta 2003], p.231
A Reaction
You can't get away from eternal recurrence being an imaginative trick, to focus value onto our choices. For a while Nietzsche tried to persuade himself that the recurrence actually occurred, but we all know it doesn't.
| 22093 | Life is a repetition when what has been now becomes [Kierkegaard] |
| 20137 | The great person engages wholly with life, and is happy to endlessly relive the life they created [Nietzsche] |
| 20144 | Eternal recurrence is the highest attainable affirmation [Nietzsche] |
| 24088 | See our present lives as eternal! Religions see it as fleeting, and aim at some different life [Nietzsche] |
| 24119 | The eternal return of wastefulness is a terrible thought [Nietzsche] |
| 24136 | Who can endure the thought of eternal recurrence? [Nietzsche] |
| 24154 | If you want one experience repeated, you must want all of them [Nietzsche] |
| 2936 | Imagine if before each of your actions you had to accept repeating the action over and over again [Nietzsche] |
| 6842 | Nietzsche says facing up to the eternal return of meaninglessness is the response to nihilism [Nietzsche, by Critchley] |
| 7172 | Existence without meaning or goal or end, eternally recurring, is a terrible thought [Nietzsche] |
| 20124 | Reliving life countless times - this gives the value back to life which religion took away [Nietzsche] |