Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
AGNES REPPLIERLife 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
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Friendship takes time.
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real letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
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Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
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Personally, 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.
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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.
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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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It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
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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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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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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.
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The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
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The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.
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