Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?
AGNES REPPLIERLike simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
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Economics and ethics have little in common.
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It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
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Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
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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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Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
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Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
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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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Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
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We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
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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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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.
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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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.
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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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Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
AGNES REPPLIER