While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
AGNES REPPLIERThose 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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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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Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.
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When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.
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A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.
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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.
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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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People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
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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.
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What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
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Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
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The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
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Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
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