fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.
AGNES REPPLIERThe comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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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 -
Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
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 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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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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
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The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.
AGNES REPPLIER -
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
AGNES REPPLIER -
whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Our 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.
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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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For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.
AGNES REPPLIER