People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
AGNES REPPLIERPeople who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
AGNES REPPLIERHumor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
AGNES REPPLIERWe owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
AGNES REPPLIERScience may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
AGNES REPPLIERWhere there is no temptation, there is no virtue.
AGNES REPPLIERIt is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
AGNES REPPLIERIt is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
AGNES REPPLIERWit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
AGNES REPPLIERThe gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.
AGNES REPPLIERthe tea-hour is the hour of peace … strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle – a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
AGNES REPPLIERDemocracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
AGNES REPPLIERThe sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.
AGNES REPPLIERIt 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 REPPLIERInnovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
AGNES REPPLIERIt has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
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.
AGNES REPPLIER