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.
AGNES REPPLIEROur 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
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An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.
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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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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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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
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Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.
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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
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A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.
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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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If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
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Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.
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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.
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The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.
AGNES REPPLIER