Agnes Repplier famous quotes

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Happiness #Women #Recovery

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

#Dog #Vanity #Admire

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Love #Laughing #Said

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Funny #Patience #Humor

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Cat #Rushing #Mad

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Choices #Want #Trouble

A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Dog #Common Sense #Spirit

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

#Men #Self #Leisure

The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Memorable #Would Be #May

Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Adam #Conversation #Difficult

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Strong #Writing #Careers

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

#Cat #Giving #Pet

It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Inspirational #Mind #Impossible

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Truth #Naked #Nudity

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Funny #Women #Humor

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Travel

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

#History #Fluid

History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
-- Agnes Repplier

#History #Favors #May

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Delight #Guests #Leisure

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Dream #Appreciation #Thinking

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Thinking #History #Study

History is not written in the interests of morality.
-- Agnes Repplier

#History #Morality #Interest

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

#Peace #Struggle #Hands

A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Peace #World #Candor

Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity ...
-- Agnes Repplier

#Heart #Humor #Sanity

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

#Humor #Essence #Mind

Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Learning #Knowledge #Charming

to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Kindness #Giving #Quality

There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
-- Agnes Repplier

#World #Jokes

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

#Envy #Purpose #Good Work

Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Innovation #Committed #Newness

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Knowledge #Hands #Knowing

Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Mars #Earth #May

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Laughter #Spring #Heart

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

#Laughter #Serious #Reason

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Humor #Fate #Effort

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

#Humor #Obscure #Social

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Believe #Men #Grace

The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation - that recreation for which we are now told every community stands responsible - were provided for its entertainment.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Happiness #People #Community

It is claimed that the United States gets the cleanest and purest tea in the market, and certainly it is too good to warrant the nervous apprehension which strains and dilutes it into nothingness. The English do not strain their tea in the fervid fashion we do. They like to see a few leaves dawdling about the cup. They like to know what they are drinking.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Fashion #Drinking #Tea

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Teaching #Learning #Busy

Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Loyalty #Desire #Passionate

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

#Teacher #Profound #Choices

There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Education #Language #Liberal Education

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Education #Brother #Children

Economics and ethics have little in common.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Littles #Ethics #Common

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Appreciate #Literature #Discrimination

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Reading #Glasses #Vision

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Civilization #Tea #England

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

#Thinking #England #Permit

Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Writing #Men #Generosity

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

#Friendship #Had Enough #Firsts

It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Mind #France #Habit

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

#Office #Novelists #Fiction

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

#Thinking #Feelings #Littles

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

#Asking #Favors #Way

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Play #Groups #Fairness

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

#Envy #Wish #Way

Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Men #Envy #Selfishness

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

#Men #Diaries #Delight

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

#Strong #Men #Law

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Passion #Political #Wasps

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

#Grief #Bears #Trouble

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

#Travel #Blessing #Trials

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Travel #Light #Comfort

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

#Years #Example #Construction

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

#Travel #Mind #Desire

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Travel #Children #Thinking

The tourist may complain of other tourists; but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms; but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Travel #Dining #Complaining

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

#Travel #Traveler

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

#Heart #One Direction #Dear

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

#Kindness #Milk #Draught

Wit is a thing capable of proof.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Proof #Wit #Capable

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Fall #Sobriety #Tree

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

#Men #Feminist #Suffering

Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Healing #Political #Doubt

We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Height #Moral #Scales

Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients ...
-- Agnes Repplier

#Love Is #Common #Patient

America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Blessed #Son #America

Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word 'million' is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Thinking #Giving #United States

the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Youth #Tenacity #Charming

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

#Thinking #Shifting #Comedy

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

#Girl #Country #Believe

Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Temptation #Virtue

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.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Pain #Fate #Men

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

#Past #Foolish #Subtle

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

#Reading #Character #Incidents

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

#Believe #Writing #Men

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

#Yield #Years #Stronger

real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Real #Writing #Humanity

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
-- Agnes Repplier

#People #Literature #Letters

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

#Years #Octopus #Letters

[Mary Wortley Montagu] wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed ... 'Les morts n'écrivent point,' said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?
-- Agnes Repplier

#Eight #Two #Nephew

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

#Party #Greed #Political

There are people who balk at small civilities on account of their manifest insincerity. ... It is better and more logical to accept all the polite phraseology which facilitates intercourse, and contributes to the sweetness of life. If we discarded the formal falsehoods which are the currency of conversation, we should not be one step nearer the vital things of truth.
-- Agnes Repplier

#People #Steps #Civility

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

#Cat #Tea #Sound

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

#Taste #Enough

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

#Talking #People #Sacred

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Voice #Storytelling #Infancy

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.
-- Agnes Repplier

#Phrases #Speech #Accepted