Top 100 Agnes Repplier Quotes
#1. When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
Agnes Repplier
#2. 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
#3. There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
Agnes Repplier
#4. But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.
Agnes Repplier
#5. It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
Agnes Repplier
#6. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#7. 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
#8. Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
Agnes Repplier
#9. Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients ...
Agnes Repplier
#10. 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
#11. History is not written in the interests of morality.
Agnes Repplier
#12. A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.
Agnes Repplier
#13. The most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.
Agnes Repplier
#14. The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
Agnes Repplier
#15. The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.
Agnes Repplier
#16. 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
#17. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#18. There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania ...
Agnes Repplier
#19. We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
#20. The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.
Agnes Repplier
#21. The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.
Agnes Repplier
#22. It is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.
Agnes Repplier
#23. It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
Agnes Repplier
#24. 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 Repplier
#25. To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.
Agnes Repplier
#26. 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 ...
Agnes Repplier
#27. 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
#28. The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
Agnes Repplier
#29. 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
#31. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
Agnes Repplier
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity ...
Agnes Repplier
#37. Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
Agnes Repplier
#38. Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.
Agnes Repplier
#39. 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
#40. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
Agnes Repplier
#41. 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
#42. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#43. 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
#44. The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
Agnes Repplier
#45. We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
Agnes Repplier
#46. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.
Agnes Repplier
#47. Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
Agnes Repplier
#48. There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
Agnes Repplier
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
Agnes Repplier
#52. 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
#53. The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.
Agnes Repplier
#54. 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
#55. To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
Agnes Repplier
#56. The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
Agnes Repplier
#57. It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
Agnes Repplier
#58. It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
#59. It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
#60. The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
Agnes Repplier
#61. 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
#62. English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
Agnes Repplier
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
Agnes Repplier
#66. A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
Agnes Repplier
#67. It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
Agnes Repplier
#68. The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
Agnes Repplier
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
Agnes Repplier
#73. Art ... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
Agnes Repplier
#74. I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
Agnes Repplier
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
Agnes Repplier
#78. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#79. 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
#80. Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.
Agnes Repplier
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Whatever has "wit enough to keep it sweet" defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
Agnes Repplier
#84. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
Agnes Repplier
#85. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
Agnes Repplier
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
Agnes Repplier
#89. There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
Agnes Repplier
#90. A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.
Agnes Repplier
#91. The labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
Agnes Repplier
#92. 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
#93. Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier
#94. Fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.
Agnes Repplier
#95. This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
Agnes Repplier
#96. 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
#97. People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
#98. 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.
Agnes Repplier
#100. The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.
Agnes Repplier
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
