It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.
AGNES REPPLIERThe comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
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The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
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The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join
AGNES REPPLIER -
It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.
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Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
AGNES REPPLIER






