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 REPPLIERPhiladelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
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The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.
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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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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
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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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People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
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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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Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.
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Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
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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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Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
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Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.
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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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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
AGNES REPPLIER