When the Eleatics rejected motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, launched a counterattack; he indeed did so; for he did not say a word; he simply walked a few steps back and forth, believing that in this way he had adequately refuted them.

Having occupied my mind for a considerable time, at least occasionally, was the problem of whether a repetition is possible and what it means, whether something gains or loses by being repeated; it suddenly crossed my mind: and you are not going to Berlin, where you have been before, to see now if a repetition is possible and what it means.

At home, I had almost paralyzed myself with this problem. Whatever they may say about it, it is going to play a very important role in contemporary philosophy; for repetition is a decisive expression for what "memory" was for the Greeks.

Just as they taught that all knowledge is a memory, similarly the new philosophy will teach that the entirety of life is a repetition. The only modern philosopher who had some intuition of the matter is Leibniz.

Repetition and memory are the same movement, only in reverse directions; for whatever we remember, existed, it is repeated backward; whereas, conversely, the actual repetition is remembered forward.

For this reason, if repetition is possible, it makes a person happy, while memory makes him unhappy, on the condition that he gives himself the time to live, and does not immediately from his birth look for some excuse to slip out of life again, e.g., that he has forgotten something.

SØREN KIERKEGAARD