When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.
AGNES REPPLIERSleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
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The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.
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There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
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The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge … falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
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We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
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The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.
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The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
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Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
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There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
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the tea-hour is the hour of peace … strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle – a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
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There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
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People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
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No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
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the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
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The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
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There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
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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.
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if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
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