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(Photo: Brett Jordan)

“Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult…Anyway, we cannot keep still: we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant, and careful, and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully…Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread.”

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“Practice is a particular type of repetition without repetition.”

Nikolai Bernstein, The Co-Ordination and Regulation of Movements

“What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”

– Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“This is the quiet miracle of repetition: its ability to not only make actions easier over time, but also change one’s desires, bringing the cravings of the flesh in line with the aspirations of the spirit (or as [William] James puts it, making ‘our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy’).”

Meghan Ogieblyn,
“Routine Maintenance: Embracing habit in an automated world”

“Freedom comes from infinite repetition of a technique.”

Soetsu Yanagi,
The Unknown Craftsman