There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.
AGNES REPPLIEREdged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
-
-
But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.
AGNES REPPLIER -
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
AGNES REPPLIER -
the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
AGNES REPPLIER -
No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
AGNES REPPLIER -
A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.
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 -
The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Economics and ethics have little in common.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
AGNES REPPLIER -
To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
AGNES REPPLIER -
If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
AGNES REPPLIER