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

“He who doesn't understand history is doomed to repeat it.”
― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

“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

“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 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

“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 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

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

“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

“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

“Use different requesting methods, even if asking for the same thing.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Art takes what in life is an accidental pleasure and tries to repeat and prolong it.”
― Edwin Denby

“Therefore, to adopt the Four Agreements, you need to put repetition in action. Practicing the new agreements in your life is how your best becomes better. Repetition makes the master.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

“But, on another level, there's a lot to be said for repetition, and I think I might actually understand what's going on around me for the first time in my entire life. It's not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Maybe this is how other people feel all the time; some of us just need a dress rehearsal first.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I return myself to the safety of my bedroom and throw myself into a loop of my own making: read a book I've already read, watch a TV show I've seen dozens of times, wear my Wednesday pajamas and eat my Wednesday dinner. I listen to a favorite song on repeat, dozens of times; bury myself in familiarity like a small, hurt animal in its den, turning in tiny circles until it can comfortably settle. I make the same small sounds to myself, over and over again. I curl up in a ball on my bed, rocking gently, losing myself in the comfort of a pattern.
I soothe myself with repetition until I feel calm.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“To echo is not to repeat, but to diminish.

['Echo']”
― Callie Siskel, Two Minds: Poems