A Quote by Ellen Glasgow

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

Ellen Glasgow

Quote Topics

Acts Become Like Repeated Stale Words

Quote Author

Ellen Glasgow
American - Novelist
April 22, 1873 - November 21, 1945

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.

William S. Burroughs

A great many of us must move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.

Barbara Deming

What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

Henry David Thoreau

Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

Terry Tempest Williams

Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.

Mortimer Adler

When a poem might become a song, then certain parts are repeated and might become a refrain or a chorus, so they change in that way. But it's more the nature of the words and what they're saying that determines whether it's a poem or a song.

PJ Harvey

In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts.

Theodore Roosevelt

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.

Simon McBurney

With every adversity comes a blessing because a shock acts as a reminder to oneself that we must not get stale in routine.

Bruce Lee

It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

Kim Stanley

Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

Ben Okri

Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts. What he at first chooses, at last compels.

Orison Swett Marden

Such words as amen, hallelujah, glory and others of like sacred association are repeated endlessly and meaninglessly in the apparent belief that they have in them some strange power for good. This can be no more than high-grade magic. It will pay us to search our own hearts thoroughly to discover just why we use these words.