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While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

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
Pleasure
Art
True
May
Instructing
Wells
Instruct
Without
Pleasing
Well
Nevertheless
Please

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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
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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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Bargaining is essential to the life of the world but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
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Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.
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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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Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of 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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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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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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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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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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Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
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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.
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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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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
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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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It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
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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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