Most wonderful things quickly become unwonderful if they are repeated too often. Once-in-a-life is often the optimal interval.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing “later” are no match for the power of habits.

Your pleasures lessen in intensity the more the are repeated. Yet your capacity to experience ever more agony — is inexhaustible.

almost any habit can be called an “addiction” if its repetition is reinforced in the human brain, by rhythmic release of pleasure-mediating chemicals. The core process is not, in itself, harmful. Indeed, it is deeply human and essential! Pleasure-based repetition reinforcement is partly responsible for our tight bonding to our children, our husbands and wives, or the tendency to keep returning our attention to music, or beauty, or the glorious exercise of skill. It contributes to the joy that some derive from prayer. These are some of the good and wholesome things that we are glad to be addicted to!

When you repeat something enough times, you establish new neural pathways in the brain that your habit flows through effortlessly and automatically, allowing you to literally fuggetaboutit.

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight - if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.

The Law of Diminishing Returns, true in life as well as in story, is this: The more often we experience something, the less effect it has. Emotional experience, in other words, cannot be repeated back-to-back with effect. […] The first time we experience an emotion or sensation it has full effect. If we try repeat this experience immediately, it has half or less than half of its full effect. If we go straight to the same emotion for the third time, it not only doesn’t have the original effect, it delivers the opposite effect

Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure

Habit... makes the endurance of evil easy (which, under the name of patience, is falsely honored as a virtue), because sensations of the same type, when continued without alteration for a long time, draw our attention away from the senses so that we are scarcely conscious of them at all. On the other hand, habit also makes the consciousness and the remembrance of good that has been received more difficult, which then gradually leads to ingratitude (a real vice). [...] Acquired habit deprives good actions of their moral value because it undermines mental freedom and, moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetitions of the same acts (monotony), and thus becomes ridiculous.

There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.

But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.

Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant the arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort.

We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences