Repetition Quotes

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
― Adolf Hitler

“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it.

(Young India 1924-1926)”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“...I live with regrets - the bittersweet loss of innocence - the red track of the moon upon the lake - the inability to return and do it again...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”
― Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

“I am a fan of overdoing something, but not running it into the ground. They are complete opposites with only a fine line separating them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.”
― Voltaire

“The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.”
― Dawn Powell

“There is, in the Army, a little known but very important activity appropriately called Fatigue. Fatigue, in the Army, is the very necessary cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of living. Any man who has ever owned a gun has known Fatigue, when, after fifteen minutes in the woods and perhaps three shots at an elusive squirrel, he has gone home to spend three-quarters of an hour cleaning up his piece so that it will be ready next time he goes to the woods. Any woman who has ever cooked a luscious meal and ladled it out in plates upon the table has known Fatigue, when, after the glorious meal is eaten, she repairs to the kitchen to wash the congealed gravy from the plates and the slick grease from the cooking pots so they will be ready to be used this evening, dirtied, and so washed again. It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other."

[1880]”
― Max Beerbohm, Collected Works of Max Beerbohm

“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered.
But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Repetition opens doors, you know?”
― Tim Lucas, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula

“Being able to be repeated controllably
is one key element in risk management.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Repetition of an argument proves your determination, not truth.”
― Raheel Farooq, Kalam

“It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.”
― Janet Beizer

“...I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. "Why I was so worried," she said, "was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“My kind of love is made for the stage,
untouchable and unbroken;
its fate is to be doomed in repetition,
in the most beautiful form of art.”
― Laura Chouette

“It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE.”
― Chesterton G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

“There isn't anything in this world that you couldn't do or become. Embed this belief by simply repeating it to yourself over and over. Your subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, absorbing what you continuously tell it.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Lord knows people hate repetition.” He frowned. “But then they’ll also complain when something wasn’t exactly the same as it was before. I really don’t get humans.”
― T.J. Klune, A Destiny of Dragons

“Repetition resembles even the foundations of all reality, the productivity of the Holy Trinity, which St. John Damascene describes in the language of imaging: “The Son is the Father's image, and the Spirit the Son's, through which Christ dwelling in man makes him after his own image.” To despise this facet of reality echoes the Lacanian “solid hatred addressed to being,” and depicts even God as subject to ennui before a kenotic descent.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work