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.
AGNES REPPLIERThere is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
-
-
It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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!
AGNES REPPLIER -
Economics and ethics have little in common.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
AGNES REPPLIER -
If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.
AGNES REPPLIER