Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
AGNES REPPLIERreal letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.
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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.
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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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Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
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Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
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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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A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.
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While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
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A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.
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Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
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The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.
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Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.
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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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A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.
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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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It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.
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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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We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
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We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
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The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
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The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.
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real letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
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The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
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