People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
AGNES REPPLIERMen who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
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We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.
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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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There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
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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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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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Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
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The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.
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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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It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
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It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
AGNES REPPLIER