17 Quotes Tagged: repetition

The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

We're taught by repetition but great innovators need to be great at doing the different.

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...

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.

So if you do something, you should be observant, and careful, and alert.

Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

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.

I am used to swan songs; I have sung them several times.

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.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape

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

It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.