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 REPPLIERThe thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
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the 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.
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While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
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What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.
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The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.
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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.
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the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
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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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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
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I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.
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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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This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
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A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.
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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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The 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.
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It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.
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Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
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It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.
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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
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Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
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Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients.
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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