amor fati
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' ... 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.'
....
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to
have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism
is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.
- Nietzsche (epigraph to Atkinson's Life after Life)
