Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to for...get and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never get either all the light or all the heat out of anything. So with God and the devil; so with everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to explain one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly he found he had pressed the spring of the grenade. He struggled to pull it out of his pocket. It stuck in the narrow pock...et. His arm and his cold fingers that clutched the grenade seemed paralyzed. Then a warm joy went through him. He had thrown it. Anderson was standing up, swaying backwards and forwards. The explosion made the woods quake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
as his weight wilts and he is on a porch... that won't hold my arms, or the legs of the race run forwards, or the film played backwards on his grandson's eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it... must be lived--forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My formula for greatness in human beings is amor fati: that one wants to change nothing, neither forwards, nor backwards, nor in a...ll eternity. Not merely to endure necessity, still less to hide it--all idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity--but rather to love it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this... Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned... upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »