We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
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There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
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It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
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The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
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The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
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Humor brings insight and tolerance.
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If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
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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.
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It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
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Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
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In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
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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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We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.
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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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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
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Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
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People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
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The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.
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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.
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Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
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People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
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What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?
AGNES REPPLIER