Agnes Repplier Quotes

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.

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.

The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.

When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.

If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?

There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.

We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

abroad it is our habit to regard all other travelers in the light of personal and unpardonable grievances. They are intruders into our chosen realms of pleasure, they jar upon our sensibilities, they lessen our meager share of comforts, they are everywhere in our way, they are always an unnecessary feature in the landscape.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

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.

Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity.

Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

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.

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.

Friendship takes time.

I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.

It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.

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.

To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.

Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.

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.

Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.

Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.

By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.

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.

The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

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.

Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

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.

If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.

Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.

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.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.

Humor brings insight and tolerance.