Quotes About Repetition

You know the saying: he who doesn't understand history is doomed to repeat it. And when it's repeated, the stakes are doubled.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

nihil novum nihil varium nihil quod non semel spectasse sufficiat

I am astounded at how long it takes to discover... for the first time, the things I have learned... over and over again all my life.

When a man repeats a promise again and again, he means to fail you.

Fools repeat the proverb

The wise makes proverbs, and fools repeat them.

Life is a wheel. The way we end up where we begin. From here everything rises—the worn path, the moon with its long bright ears. Imagine water traveling back up into the sky, the sound of it climbing like a question. Who would we be if we had stayed?

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not.

Mark Twain's quote: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure.

might even be their forgotten suffering at the hands of literary texts that had left behind this residue of respect for books; if, that is, psychoanalysts are to be believed when they say we are unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.

It was human nature, his mother said, for people to wish cruelty on one another simply because they had been shown cruelty themselves: the repetition of behavioural forms was the curious panacea with which most people sought to relieve the suffering caused by precisely those same forms.

The thing is,' he said,' 'that kind of life - the parties, the drugs, the staying up all night - is basically repetitive. It doesn't get you anywhere and it isn't meant to, because what it represents is freedom... And to stay free... you have to reject change.

She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism; her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she'll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn't come then down she'll go.

I've heard Donald Trump say some pretty unhinged things. I've heard them over and over and over again. But nothing is more dangerous to our democracy than his attacks on mail-in voting in the middle of a pandemic.