Maurice Blanchot Quotes

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.

Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible!

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning.

The course of a lifetime runs/over and over again

All poetry comes from repetition.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.

All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in circle.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

We're going to do it again next year. We'll see you again next year. Yeah, I said it. Yeah, I said it. We will do it again next year.

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

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!

What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.