Quote

I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

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
Language
Acquire
Enable
Attaches
Always
Twenty
Languages
Wasteful
Would
Twenties
Maximum
Gathers
Time
Ridiculous
Conventions
Oratory
Personality
Minimum
Hopelessly
Minutes
Fifteen
Etiquette
Learning
Excess
Sanctity
Wonder
Twelve
Inadequate
Especial

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

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Necessity knows no Sunday.
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It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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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 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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A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.
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Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
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He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
Agnes Repplier
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Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.
Agnes Repplier
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
Agnes Repplier
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
Agnes Repplier
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Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
Agnes Repplier
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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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the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
Agnes Repplier
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No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
Agnes Repplier
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Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
Agnes Repplier