the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
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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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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Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity.
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The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.
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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 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.
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There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
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The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
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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 well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge … falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
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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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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.
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The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.
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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