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 REPPLIERThe 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.
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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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Wit is a thing capable of proof.
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Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
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The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge … falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
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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.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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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.
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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.
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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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What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?
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It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
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Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients.
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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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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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