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 REPPLIERI do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
AGNES REPPLIER -
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.
AGNES REPPLIER -
This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
AGNES REPPLIER