The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
AGNES REPPLIERThe necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
AGNES REPPLIERBooks that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
AGNES REPPLIERI am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
AGNES REPPLIERIt is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
AGNES REPPLIERJust as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.
AGNES REPPLIERWe cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
AGNES REPPLIERThere was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.
AGNES REPPLIERthe labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
AGNES REPPLIERWit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
AGNES REPPLIERIt is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
AGNES REPPLIERSensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
AGNES REPPLIERGuests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
AGNES REPPLIERResistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
AGNES REPPLIERThere is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
AGNES REPPLIERLetter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
AGNES REPPLIERTraveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
AGNES REPPLIER