Repetition Quotes - Page 11

• When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

  Milan Kundera

  Kissing, Avid, Events

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• The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

  Carl Schmitt

  Real, Break Through, Interesting

  Carl Schmitt (2010). “Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty”, p.15, University of Chicago Press

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• Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

  Thomas Sowell

  Blood, Years, Iraq

  Thomas Sowell (2011). “Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays (Large Print 16pt)”, p.397, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.

  Milan Kundera

  Echoes, Two, Essentials

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• Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

  C. S. Lewis

  Symphony, Would Be, Asking

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Perelandra”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.

  Janet Fitch

  Karma, Caring, Thinking

  Janet Fitch (2013). “Paint It Black”, p.90, Hachette UK

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• Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Fighting, Space, Plot

  Karen Joy Fowler (2005). “The Jane Austen Book Club”, p.193, Penguin

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• There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.

  Oliver Sacks

  Song, Children, Musical

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• He also deeply distrusts vampires, as you had guessed yourself,” Bones added. “Aside from that, all I heard was enough repetitions of ‘how many chucks could a woodchuck chuck’ to make me want to stake myself.

  Jeaniene Frost

  Vampire, Want, Bones

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• The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

  H. L. Mencken

  Mistake, Men, Thinking

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• Training is principally an act of faith. The athlete must believe in its efficacy; he must believe that through training he will become fitter and stronger; that by constant repetition of the same movements he will become more skilful and his muscles more relaxed...He must be a fanatic for hard work and enthusiastic enough to enjoy it.

  Franz Stampfl

  Sports, Believe, Hard Work

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• Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.

  Anne Bronte

  Real, Moving, Thinking

  Anne Bronte (2016). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Diversion Illustrated Classics)”, p.98, Diversion Books

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• The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding.

  James Madison

  Trust, Jobs, Regret

  Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2017). “The Origin of the Nation: Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Other Amendments, Federalist Papers & Common Sense: Creating America - Landmark Documents that Shaped a New Nation”, p.266, Madison & Adams Press

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• Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Reading, Grandmother, Boys

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Mortality”, p.33, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• ...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Miracle, Ordinary, Endless

  Orhan Pamuk (2004). “Snow”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him by brief repetitions that are requests for personal favors, and nothing more.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Prayer, Favors, Privilege

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• Importunity is a condition of prayer. We are to press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer. We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray "with all perseverance." We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We press our pleas because we must have them, or die.

  Edward McKendree Bounds

  Perseverance, Prayer, Heart

  Edward McKendree Bounds (1920). “Purpose in Prayer”, p.39, CCEL

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• With enough emotional intensity and repetition, our nervous systems experience something as real, even if it hasn't occurred yet.

  Tony Robbins

  Real, Inspirational Life, Emotional

  Tony Robbins (2012). “Awaken The Giant Within”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

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• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

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• There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Reflection, Past, Form

  Siri Hustvedt (2011). “The Summer Without Men: A Novel”, p.94, Macmillan

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• I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Dream, Morning, Heart

  Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus (1979). “Three Plays”, p.41, Grove Press

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• Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

  Zadie Smith

  Children, Moving, Islands

  Zadie Smith (2000). “White teeth”

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• Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

  Winston Churchill

  Simple, Thinking, Self

  Winston Churchill, Robert Rhodes James (1980). “Churchill speaks: Winston S. Churchill in peace and war : collected speeches, 1897-1963”, Atheneum

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• Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.

  Martin Buber

  Unique, Men, Tasks

  Martin Buber (2015). “Hasidism and Modern Man”, p.66, Princeton University Press

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• Repetition is sometimes the best way to deal with the Luideag: just keep saying the same thing over and over until she gets fed up and gives you what you want. All preschoolers have an instinctive grasp of this concept, but most don’t practice it on immortal water demons. That’s probably why there are so few disembowelments in your average preschool.

  Mira Grant

  Average, Practice, Giving

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