Agnes Repplier Quotes

180 Sourced Quotes

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

Agnes Repplier
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
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
Subtlety being an intellectual asset, film directors rightly conceive that it would be lost upon their audiences.

Agnes Repplier
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
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
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
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

Agnes Repplier
The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.

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

Agnes Repplier
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
It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.

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

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

Agnes Repplier
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
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
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's attention to their presence.

Agnes Repplier
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
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
No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

Agnes Repplier
We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

Agnes Repplier
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
History is, and has always been hampered 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
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
Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.

Agnes Repplier
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.

Agnes Repplier
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