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 REPPLIERWe owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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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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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
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What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
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What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?
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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 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.
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It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
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Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
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The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
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Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
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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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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.
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In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin
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History is not written in the interests of morality.
AGNES REPPLIER