People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
AGNES REPPLIERLaughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
-
-
Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
AGNES REPPLIER -
If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Economics and ethics have little in common.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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 REPPLIER -
For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.
AGNES REPPLIER