Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
AGNES REPPLIERAn 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
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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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Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
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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.
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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.
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
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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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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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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.
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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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Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
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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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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.
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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