"What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you:This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!'- Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!' If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: 'do you want this again and again, times without number?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Eternal recurrence'
100 years after death, Nietzsche's popularity keeps growing: (Popular) Magazine article on Friedrich Nietzsche, from Stanford University 6/5/01.
'... Nietzsche has made his way into popular culture. He has been mentioned on The Sopranos and in the film Good Will Hunting, is read by cultural icons like Shaquille O'Neal and Marilyn Manson, and has been fictionalized by Stanford Professor Irvin Yalom, the author of When Nietzsche Wept ...'
Microsoft Encarta article on Nietzsche.
... 'One of Nietzsche’s fundamental contentions was that traditional values (represented primarily by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of individuals. He expressed this in his proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented a “slave morality,” a morality created by weak and resentful individuals who encouraged such behavior as gentleness and kindness because the behavior served their interests. Nietzsche claimed that new values could be created to replace the traditional ones, and his discussion of the possibility led to his concept of the overman or superman ...'
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Nietzsche.
'Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who challenged the foundations of traditional morality and Christianity. He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to Nietzsche's philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation," which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines which drain life's energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first "existentialist" philosophers, Nietzsche has inspired leading figures in all walks of cultural life, including dancers, poets, novelists, painters, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and social revolutionaries ...'
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche - Henry Louis Mencken's entire 1908 book online.
'There is no escaping Nietzsche. You may hold him a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is in your ears and his blasphemies sink into your mind. He has colored the thought and literature, the speculation and theorizing, the politics and superstition of the time. He reigns as king in the German universities - where, since Luther's day, all the world's most painful thinking has been done - and his echoes tinkle, harshly or faintly, from Chicago to Mesopotamia. His ideas appear in the writings of men as unlike as Roosevelt and Bernard Shaw; even the newspapers are aware of him. He is praised and berated, accepted and denounced, canonized and damned. Pythagoras had no more devout disciples and Spinoza had no more murderous and violent foes. Wherefore it may be a toil of some profit to examine his ideas a bit closely; to differentiate between what he said in his books and what his apostles and interpreters and enemies say or think he said; and in the end, perhaps, to find out what he meant ...'
Online adaptation of 1912 Nietzsche book by Paul Elmer More.
'... If the number of books written about a subject is any proof of interest in it, Nietzsche must have become one of the most popular of authors among Englishmen and Americans ...'
John Shand's chapter on Nietzsche from Philosophy and Philosophers.
Advanced-Introductory-level material. Discusses Nietzsche's perspectivism, the idea that there is no truth - only perspectives. Also discusses common-sense, will-to-power, objective values, interpretation-independent reality, causality and the Übermensch or the 'Overman'/'Superman'. Exciting shit!
The Friedrich Nietzsche Channel: Nietzsche's Works Online
All of Nietzsche's major works online for you to save, search, print or spit on. The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, the Birth of Tragedy, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Human All Too Human, The Will to Power, etc.