But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.
AGNES REPPLIERWhen the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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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 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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Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
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A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
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People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.
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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
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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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Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients.
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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.
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There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
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Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
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The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.
AGNES REPPLIER