Agnes Repplier > Quotes

“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ”
― Agnes Repplier

“A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.”
― Agnes Repplier

“It's not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it's not possible to find it elsewhere.”
― Agnes Repplier

“We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh. ”
― Agnes Repplier

“People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.”
― Agnes Repplier

“It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.”
― Agnes Repplier

“Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”
― Agnes Repplier, Essays in idleness

“Things are as they are, and no amount of self-deception makes them otherwise. The friend who is incapable of depression depresses us as surely as the friend who is incapable of boredom bores us. Somewhere in our hearts is a strong, though dimly understood, desire to face realities, and to measure consequences, to have done with the fatigue of pretending. It is not optimism to enjoy the view when one is treed by a bull; it is philosophy. The optimist would say that being treed was a valuable experience. The disciple of gladness would say it was a pleasurable sensation. The Christian Scientist would say there was no bull, though remaining–if he were wise–on the tree-top. The philosopher would make the best of a bad job, and seek what compensation he could find.”
― Agnes Repplier, Points of Friction

“A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.”
― Agnes Repplier

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”
― Agnes Repplier

“its not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it is not possible to find it elsewhere”
― Agnes Repplier

“There are few of us who do not occasionally wish we had been born in other days, in days for which we have some secret affinity, and which shine for us with a mellow light in the deceitful pages of history . . . For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible. It was not a time distinguished – in England, at least – for wit or wisdom, for public virtues or for private charm; but it was a time when literary reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody needed to despair of one.”
― Agnes Repplier, A happy half-century, and other essays 1908 [Hardcover]

“We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have been taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer, preacher, or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious, finds himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told, freshens our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will–which is true. It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and disposes us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone, and the echo of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through the centuries. Humour which
has no scorn, wit which has no sting, jests which have no victim, these are not the pleasantries which have provoked mirth, or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized rather than a civilized world.”
― Agnes Repplier, Points of Friction