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What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

Agnes Repplier

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Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Argument
Swiftly
Laugh
Batteries
Laughing
Monstrous
Knell
Serious
Absurdity
Crumbled
Death
Arguments
Paradoxes
Whole
Paradox
Absurdities
Dust
Ringing
Laughter
Resisted

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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 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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What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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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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Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
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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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A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, 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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It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
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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 than it can profitably hold, which has cost us, among other things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.
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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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It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
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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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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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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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The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need there is barely enough to go round.
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Necessity knows no Sunday.
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It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
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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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There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
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