the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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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.
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The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.
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Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.
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the 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.
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I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
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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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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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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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It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.
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Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
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If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
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Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
AGNES REPPLIER






