The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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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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Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
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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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There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.
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Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.
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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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Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
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The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.
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Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?
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Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.
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The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.
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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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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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Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
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I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
AGNES REPPLIER