Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.
AGNES REPPLIEREverybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.
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Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
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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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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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Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
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it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.
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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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The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
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It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
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The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.
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It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.
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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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The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.
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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.
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The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
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There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.
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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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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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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 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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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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Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
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Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients.
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There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
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History is not written in the interests of morality.
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People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
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