The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.
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
-
-
The audience is the controlling factor in the actor’s life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.
AGNES REPPLIER -
it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.
AGNES REPPLIER -
No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
AGNES REPPLIER -
It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Friendship takes time.
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 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 -
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?
AGNES REPPLIER -
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
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 -
It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.
AGNES REPPLIER -
I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER