Agnes Repplier Quotes - Page 7

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

People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.

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.

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

Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.

Friendship takes time.

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

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

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.

A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.

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

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.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

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

The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

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

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

If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.

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

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.

Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.

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