“Love of fate” — the attitude of seeing everything that happens, including suffering and loss, as necessary and even good, and actively loving it rather than merely enduring it..
“Love of fate” — the attitude of seeing everything that happens, including suffering and loss, as necessary and even good, and actively loving it rather than merely enduring it.
Stronger than passive acceptance, resignation, or equanimity: Nietzsche's formula is “not merely bear what is necessary… but love it.” Where equanimity is evenness toward events and eudaimonia a state of flourishing, amor fati is an active, affirmative orientation toward one's whole life, bound up with the “eternal recurrence” and total “Yes-saying.”
amor “love” + fati (genitive of fatum) “of fate” = “love of fate.”
Latin amor (“love”) + fati (genitive of fatum, “fate”).
The concept has Stoic roots (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), but its explicit, central expression is Nietzsche's: the phrase first appears at the start of Book IV of The Gay Science (written 1882) — “Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!” — and recurs in Ecce Homo. Camus later developed a parallel affirmation within absurdism.
The concept is older than the phrase: Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus expressed the idea but never wrote the Latin words (Marcus wrote in Greek). The fixed term amor fati is Nietzsche's (from 1882); loose attributions to the Stoics concern the idea, not the phrase.