The 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 REPPLIERThere is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
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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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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.
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We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.
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Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
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It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
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The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.
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We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
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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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It 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.
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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.
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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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It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
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the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring – or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps – lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.
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Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
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He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
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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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No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
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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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The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
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Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
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It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
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Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
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