We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.
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.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
-
-
When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There 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 REPPLIER -
Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.
AGNES REPPLIER -
We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
AGNES REPPLIER -
if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
AGNES REPPLIER -
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
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.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
AGNES REPPLIER -
I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
AGNES REPPLIER