Sensuality, 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 REPPLIERPeople who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring – or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps – lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.
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It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
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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 earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.
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The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
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English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
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Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
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To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
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Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
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Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
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It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
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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.
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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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