[A guard platform at Elsinore Castle, Denmark.]

            Exit Ghost.

Marcellus:

'Tis gone.
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.

Barnardo:

It was about to speak when the cock crew.

Horatio:

And then it started, like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day, and at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine; and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet, 1.1.123-137
 

  
Philosophy at Troynovant
nature of existence; history of ideas

The New York Public Library's
Nietzsche: A Selected Annotated Bibliography
  

  
Dionysos Crossing the Sea, by Exekias, circa 530 BC

Personae at Troynovant
an alternate Contents via emanant Olympians

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's
detailed entry on Friedrich Nietzsche
  

The greatest weight. — 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; 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!"

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." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science, #341  (1882; 1887)
translated by Walter Kaufmann

... the fight against Plato ... has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals. ...

But we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits — we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and — who knows? — the goal —

Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, Preface
translated by Walter Kaufmann