it takes repetitive exposure over time to a new idea before that idea becomes a natural part of your way of thinking and being.

our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

Massively up the amount of novelty in your life; the research shows that new environments and experiences are often the jumping-off point for new ideas (more opportunity for pattern recognition).

I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

for many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

Ideas are mutable. They are always capable of growing. Each time we look at them, we can see something new. We just need to give ourselves permission to do so.

The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.

Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l'ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d'idiots.

An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go further than a genius idea no one gets.

Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. Just compare the first and last time your child said "Mama" or your partner said "I love you" and you’ll know exactly what I mean. When we have an experience hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sunset from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time.

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough.