Top 100 Agnes Repplier Quotes
#1. There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
Agnes Repplier
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
Agnes Repplier
#5. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#6. 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
#7. English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
Agnes Repplier
#8. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#9. The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
Agnes Repplier
#10. It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
#11. The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
Agnes Repplier
#12. Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
Agnes Repplier
#13. There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.
Agnes Repplier
#14. The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.
Agnes Repplier
#15. The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.
Agnes Repplier
#16. People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
#17. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#18. This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
Agnes Repplier
#19. Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier
#20. 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 Repplier
#21. 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 Repplier
#22. A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
Agnes Repplier
#23. It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
Agnes Repplier
#24. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#25. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
Agnes Repplier
#26. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
Agnes Repplier
#27. 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 Repplier
#28. The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.
Agnes Repplier
#29. Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.
Agnes Repplier
#30. For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.
Agnes Repplier
#31. Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
Agnes Repplier
#32. There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.
Agnes Repplier
#33. To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.
Agnes Repplier
#34. It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
Agnes Repplier
#35. We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
#36. There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania ...
Agnes Repplier
#37. The most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.
Agnes Repplier
#38. History is not written in the interests of morality.
Agnes Repplier
#39. Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.
Agnes Repplier
#40. Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients ...
Agnes Repplier
#41. The man who never tells an unpalatable truth 'at the wrong time' (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.
Agnes Repplier
#42. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#43. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#44. There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
Agnes Repplier
#45. We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
Agnes Repplier
#46. Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.
Agnes Repplier
#47. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#48. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
Agnes Repplier
#49. Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.
Agnes Repplier
#50. Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
Agnes Repplier
#51. Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity ...
Agnes Repplier
#52. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#53. People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.
Agnes Repplier
#54. 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
#55. Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
Agnes Repplier
#57. In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin
Agnes Repplier
#58. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#59. No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
Agnes Repplier
#60. Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
Agnes Repplier
#61. Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.
Agnes Repplier
#62. It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
Agnes Repplier
#63. We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
Agnes Repplier
#64. People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
Agnes Repplier
#65. There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.
Agnes Repplier
#66. Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
Agnes Repplier
#67. Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
Agnes Repplier
#69. The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.
Agnes Repplier
#70. It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
Agnes Repplier
#71. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#72. An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
Agnes Repplier
#73. 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
#74. The tea-hour is the hour of peace ... strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle - a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
Agnes Repplier
#75. Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
Agnes Repplier
#76. While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
Agnes Repplier
#77. The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.
Agnes Repplier
#78. The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.
Agnes Repplier
#79. 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
#80. Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.
Agnes Repplier
#81. What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
Agnes Repplier
#82. Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
Agnes Repplier
#83. We may fail of our happiness, strive we ever so bravely; but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgement our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
#84. It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
Agnes Repplier
#85. It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier
#86. Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.
Agnes Repplier
#87. Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
Agnes Repplier
#88. People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
Agnes Repplier
#89. The audience is the controlling factor in the actor's life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.
Agnes Repplier
#90. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
Agnes Repplier
#91. A kitten is the most irresistible comedian in the world. Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder and mirth. It darts madly at nothing at all, and then, as though suddenly checked in the pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs with ridiculous agility and zeal.
Agnes Repplier
#92. The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.
Agnes Repplier
#93. Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.
Agnes Repplier
#94. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#95. Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
Agnes Repplier
#96. Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
Agnes Repplier
#97. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
Agnes Repplier
#98. Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
Agnes Repplier
#99. The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
Agnes Repplier
#100. It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
Agnes Repplier
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