Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
AGNES REPPLIERFor 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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
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We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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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.
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If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
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There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.
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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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It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
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When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.
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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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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.
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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.
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Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
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The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
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We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
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There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
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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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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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What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
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Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.
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The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
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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.
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There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
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Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.
AGNES REPPLIER