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 REPPLIERWit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
AGNES REPPLIERThis is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
AGNES REPPLIERThere is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
AGNES REPPLIERWe cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
AGNES REPPLIERthe pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring – or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps – lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.
AGNES REPPLIERIn those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
AGNES REPPLIERNeatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
AGNES REPPLIERLetter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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 REPPLIERThe 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 REPPLIERto be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.
AGNES REPPLIERThe 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.
AGNES REPPLIERreal letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
AGNES REPPLIERthe labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
AGNES REPPLIERIf 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 REPPLIERA kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.
AGNES REPPLIER