Repetition

Have you ever had déja vu? ~ Groundhog Day

Repetition involves saying, doing or encountering something again and again (and again). Repetition as a rhetorical device is the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to secure emphasis. Repetition in music is also common, and Repetition in rote learning is an educational technique, which can variously help, hinder or harm the development of many forms of understanding or skills.

See also:

Déjà vu

Repetition (Kierkegaard) for the 1843 book by Søren Kierkegaard

Quotes

The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road. ~ James Branch Cabell

I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am "without authority." ~ Søren Kierkegaard

• We know all our lines so well, ah-ha,
  We've said them so many times:
  Time and time again,
  Line and line again.
  • Kate Bush, in "Wow", on Lionheart (1978)

• The stranger pointed at the unfinished, unsatisfying image which stood beside the pool of Haranton, wherein, they say, strange dreams engender....
  "What is that thing?" the stranger was asking, yet again...
  "It is the figure of a man," said Manuel, "which I have modeled and remodeled, and cannot get exactly to my liking. So it is necessary that I keep laboring at it, until the figure is to my thinking and my desire."
  • James Branch Cabell, in Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances (1921) Ch. XL : Colophon: Da Capo

• The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road.
  • James Branch Cabell, in The High Place : A Comedy of Disenchantment (1923), Ch. XVI: Some Victims of Flamberge.

• We're all quite similar in the end. We all get old and tell the same tales too many times. But try and marry someone kind.
  • Richard Curtis, in About Time (2013 film)

• When ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.
  • Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew 6:7-8

• If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would not have come into existence. Either he would have followed the superficial plans of hope or he would have retracted everything and preserved it in recollection. This he did not do. Therefore, the world continues, and it continues because it is a repetition. Repetition — that is actuality and the earnestness of existence. The person who wills repetition is mature in earnestness.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, in Repetition : A Venture in Experimental Psychology (1843) Part One: Report by Constantin Constantius

• When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says; actually, which has been, now comes into existence. If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, in Repetition : A Venture in Experimental Psychology (1843) Part One: Report by Constantin Constantius

• I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am "without authority." My tactics were, by God’s aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is — even though not one single person should be induced to enter into it, and though I myself might have to give up being a Christian (in which case I should have felt obliged to make open admission of the fact). On the other hand, my tactics were these: instead of giving the impression, in however small a degree, that there are such difficulties about Christianity that an apology for it is needed if men are to be persuaded to enter into it, rather to represent it as a thing so infinitely lofty, as in truth it is, that the apology belongs in another place, is required, that is to say, of us for the fact that we venture to call ourselves Christians, or it transforms itself into a contrite confession that we have God to thank if we merely assume to regard ourselves as a Christian. But neither must this ever be forgotten: Christianity is just as lenient as it is austere, just as lenient, that is to say, infinitely lenient. When the infinite requirement is heard and upheld, heard and upheld in all its infinitude, then grace is offered, or rather grace offers itself, and to it the individual, each for himself, as I also do, can flee for refuge.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View of My Work as an Author (1848, 1851, 1859) p. 153-155

• Michael Bronski, a film critic for The Forward who teaches a course in Jewish film history at Dartmouth, said he sees strong elements of not only Jewish but also Christian theology. "The groundhog is clearly the resurrected Christ, the ever hopeful renewal of life at springtime, at a time of pagan-Christian holidays," he said, adding: "And when I say that the groundhog is Jesus, I say that with great respect."… Yogis, Jesuits and psychoanalytic practitioners have told Mr. Ramis that they feel a strong spiritual kinship with the message they see in the film. In the case of the psychoanalysts, he said, "it's the 'we keep reliving the same old patterns over and over again until we gain the right to free ourselves' thing."
  And in Washington, a branch of the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, has used the movie to instruct members in its belief that the spiritual self is not allowed to move to higher levels until it learns from past mistakes. … Some Wiccans also point to the film as particularly important to their beliefs, because Groundhog Day — the day itself — is one of the four "greater sabbats" that divide the year at the midpoints between the solstices and equinoxes.
  • Alex Kuczynski, on diverse interpretations of Groundhog Day (1993 film), in "Groundhog Almighty" in The New York Times (7 December 2003)

• I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank Piña Coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?
  • Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, in lines for "Phil Connors" in Groundhog Day (1993 film)