Quote

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Fool
Cannot
Much
Way
Palpable
People
Foolishness
Absurdity
Recognize
Civilization

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.
Agnes Repplier
Image
It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
Agnes Repplier
Image
In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
Agnes Repplier
Image
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
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.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Life is so full of miseries, minor and major they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another's attention to their presence.
Agnes Repplier