"If I were to live my life innumerable times, I just know that I can no longer live it in exactly the same way because my faith in God has become stronger and this faith has taught me to accept and carry out God's plan for me. The same events may occur but I won't be dealing with them in the same manner. My thoughts and choices will be different."
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and poet, contemplates the idea of eternal recurrence as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is “the heaviest weight” (The Gay Science, section 341) imaginable.
“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… must 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 over 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 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!’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie upon your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
