In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
AGNES REPPLIERWe cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
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The 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.
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To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.
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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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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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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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whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.
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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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It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
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