Agnes Repplier Quotes

180 Sourced Quotes

Why should our self-appointed instructors assume that because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it?

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

Agnes Repplier
Every word misused revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.

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

Agnes Repplier
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
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
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
This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

Agnes Repplier
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?

Agnes Repplier
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
While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

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

Agnes Repplier
Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.

Agnes Repplier
The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

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

Agnes Repplier
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