Agnes Repplier - Books and men (1888)

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In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity which whispers in our ears that failures are not faults!

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

Agnes Repplier
People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.

Agnes Repplier
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
The labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.

Agnes Repplier
Memory cheats us no less than hope by hazing over those things that we would fain forget; but 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
The pessimist, however, — be it recorded to his credit, — 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
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.

Agnes Repplier
The critical power, though on a distinctly lower level than the creative, is of inestimable help in its development.

Agnes Repplier
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
Self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full-blown.

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