People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
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Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
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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.
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We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
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The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
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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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While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
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It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
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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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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
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I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.
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History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
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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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What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
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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.
AGNES REPPLIER