(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — Preface, aph. 6)

However ultimate it may be, this thought seeks neither to intrude nor to impose itself upon anyone. Once spoken — though it was surely spoken more than once — it allows itself to be ignored. It will be content merely to find its way to those free spirits (and minds) for whom it was always meant — and to no one else.

Let us not, then, deceive ourselves: the Eternal Return will never become the faith of the majority of humankind. Nietzsche himself believed that only a few would ever be able to bear its truth. The Doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same, whether taken as a religious pantheistic philosophy or a philosophical pantheistic religion, will remain a faith of the few — of that minority whom no other doctrine can satisfy, and who draw from it the strength to endure the very fact of existence.

Ultimately, that is how matters stand with the Doctrine of Eternal Return: if it frightens you, if it sends fear into your bones — then flee from it without looking back. But if it lifts you more than it weighs you down, if it frees you from the fear of death — then it may well become your religion.

After all — as every post-age demands of us, and as Nietzsche taught us, as his “philosophers of the future” — we no longer insist on being right at any cost. Perhaps we are mistaken — so be it! While we are here, we shall live and wrestle with our “truths” — and one of them is precisely the truth of the Eternal Return of the Same. At times we shall guard them jealously for ourselves, and at times reveal them before others. Yet it is undeniable that they alone draw from us what is highest — and that only beneath their “sky” and “climate” do we remain the healthiest and most potent, prepared for every possibility they carry within themselves…

For all those rare and singular spirits who are not satisfied with what is, nor with what was, but demand that it return eternally as it is — only they are worthy of the doctrine of eternal recurrence.”
(parafrazirano iz Nietzscheovih Nachlass-bilješki, 1881–1883)