I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
AGNES REPPLIERI am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
AGNES REPPLIERThe necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
AGNES REPPLIERWhen the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
AGNES REPPLIERWe cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
AGNES REPPLIEROur 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 REPPLIERThere 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.
AGNES REPPLIERNeed drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
AGNES REPPLIERThe party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.
AGNES REPPLIERDemocracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
AGNES REPPLIERThe diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
AGNES REPPLIERNo rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
AGNES REPPLIEREvery true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
AGNES REPPLIERPersonally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
AGNES REPPLIERI 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.
AGNES REPPLIERThere are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
AGNES REPPLIER