Top 204 Quotes & Sayings by Agnes Repplier - Page 4

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

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

There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.

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.

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.

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

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.

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.

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.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.

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

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.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

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.

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

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.

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.

There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.

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

It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.

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.