The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
AGNES REPPLIERThe party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Economics and ethics have little in common.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
AGNES REPPLIER -
We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
AGNES REPPLIER -
For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.
AGNES REPPLIER -
People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
AGNES REPPLIER






