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1 " Tomorrow, you promise yourself, things will be different, yet, tomorrow is too often a repetition of today. And you disappoint yourself again and again. "
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2 " I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old. "
― Leo Tolstoy , Family Happiness
3 " The men worked hard and faithfully. As a rule, in spite of the number of rough characters among them, they behaved very well. One night a few of them went on a spree, and proceeded " to paint San Antonio red." One was captured by the city authorities, and we had to leave him behind us in jail. The others we dealt with ourselves, in a way that prevented a repetition of the occurrence. "
4 " Tomorrow you promise yourself will be different, yet tomorrow is too often a repetition of today. "
5 " I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history.... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20...This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued.Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will. "
― Umberto Eco , Belief or Nonbelief?
6 " It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. "
― Hazel Butler , Chasing Azrael (Deathly Insanity #1)
7 " There is a value in repetition. When we repeat certain phrases and even actions, like fingering prayer beads, we create a quiet rhythm within our spirits. The beating of our heart is a repetition as is the rhythm of our breathing. All of life has its rhythms, and the repetition of familiar prayers can bring our interior spirits into harmony with the Divine Heartbeat and the breathing of the Divine Christ. "
8 " If Miss Elton spoke water instead of words, then there would have been a repetition of Noah’s flood. "
― Kellyn Roth , The Dressmaker's Secret (The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy, #1)
9 " The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda]. "
― Jonathan Glover , Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
10 " Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands. "
― H.L. Mencken , Minority Report
11 " Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past. "