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Agnes Repplier
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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!”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.”
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“... the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.”
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“... the critical power, though on a distinctly lower level than the creative, is of inestimable help in its development.”
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“... self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full-blown ... ”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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?”
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“... there is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join.”
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“... 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.”
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“... humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. ”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“... too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.”
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“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.”
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“Art is never didactic, does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.”
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“While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.”
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“The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.”
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“Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.”
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“Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.”
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“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.”
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“A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.”
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“This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.”
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“... the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.”
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“It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.”
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“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.”
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“People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.”
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“[On Eve and Adam:] ... conversation between these two must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.”
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“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.”
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“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.”
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“... 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.”
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“A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.”
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“Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.”
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“It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations, the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live, the crowding of each day with more work and amusement than it can profitably hold, which has cost us, among other good things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.”
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“There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.”
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“... it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.”
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“The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.”
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“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.”
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“Necessity knows no Sunday.”
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“... there is nothing so lowering to one's self-esteem as the affectionate contempt of a beloved cat.”
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“... whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.”
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“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.”
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“Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.”
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“Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.”
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“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.”
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“It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought. It is the opening of our mental pores, and the stimulus of marshaling our ideas in words, of setting them forth as gallantly and as graciously as we can.”
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“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.”
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“The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.”
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“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.”
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“We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.”
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“The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth ...”
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“... there are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”
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“If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.”
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“Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients ...”
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“It is not an easy thing to be happy. It takes all the brains, and all the soul, and all the goodness we possess. We may fail of our happiness, strive we ever so bravely; but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.”
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“... 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.”
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“A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.”
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“... 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.”
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“There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.”
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“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.”
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“[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?”
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“There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.”
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“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 ...”
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“The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.”
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“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.”
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“There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.”
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“... 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.”
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“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.”
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“It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.”
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“It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.”
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“The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.”
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“Like simplicity, and candor, and other much-commended qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.”
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“Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters.”
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“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.”
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“We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.”
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“The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.”
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“Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.”
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“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.”
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“People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years, become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman.”
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“Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.”
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“If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.”
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“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.”
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“It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.”
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“Every word misused revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.”
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“Economics and ethics have little in common.”
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“Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.”
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“Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.”
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“Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.”
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“Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.”
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“It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.”
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“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.”
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“... fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.”
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“A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.”
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“... the man who never tells an unpalatable truth 'at the wrong time' (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.”
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“[On Margot Asquith's autobiography:] Never before or since has any book been so much relished by its author.”
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“Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.”
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“To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.”
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“An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.”
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“... the friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection.”
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“The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.”
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“Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.”
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“Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.”
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“Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity ...”
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“There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.”
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“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.”
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“... there is no virtue in liking them, any more than there is virtue in liking wintry weather or stringed instruments. An affection for dogs is not, as we have been given to understand, a test of an open and generous disposition. Still less is their affection for us to be accepted as a guarantee of our integrity. The assumption that a dog knows a good from a bad human being when he sees one is unwarranted.”
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“... a real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.”
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“... our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.”
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“Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.”
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“No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.”
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“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.”
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“There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.”
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“History is not written in the interests of morality.”
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“The cure-alls of the present day are infinitely various and infinitely obliging. Applied psychology, autosuggestion, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are urged upon us by kindly, if not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power. Booklets of counsel on 'How to Get What We Want,' which is impossible; booklets on 'Visualization,' warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble.”
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“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.”
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“... the audience is the controlling factor in the actor's life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.”
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“The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.”
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“The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.”
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“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.”
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“The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.”
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“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.”
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“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.”
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“Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.”
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“... the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring — or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps — lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.”
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“Subtlety being an intellectual asset, film directors rightly conceive that it would be lost upon their audiences.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.”
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“There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.”
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“I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
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“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.”
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“When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.”
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“English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.”
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“... 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.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.”
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“Wit is a thing capable of proof.”
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“People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.”
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“Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.”
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“It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.”
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“Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”
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“Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.”
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“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.”
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“I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.”
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“... I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts — facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.”
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“The clearsighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.”
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“It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.”
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“If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.”
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“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”
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“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.”
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“Mr. Theodore Dreiser's book about himself sounds like nothing but a loud, human purr.”
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“[On the radio:] ... a discovery that makes it possible for a man to deliver a speech and not only bore those nearby, but others hundreds of miles away.”
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“The mail begs for everything but my life.”
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“I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.”
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“It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.”
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“[To the absent-minded young woman about to leave who picked up her hat and scarf, put them down again, gazed around distractedly, and finally said, 'There's something I meant to say but I've forgotten what it was':] Perhaps, my dear, it was 'goodbye.'”
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“The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.”
Agnes Repplier, U.S. writer, historian, social critic
(1855 - 1950)