The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
AGNES REPPLIERScience may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.
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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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whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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real letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
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It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
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Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.
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The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
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It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
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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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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
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The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.
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We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.
AGNES REPPLIER






