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The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

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
Study
Times
History
Thing
Think
Inclines
Thinking
Incline
Hopefully
Comfortable

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

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If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
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Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.
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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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Wit is a thing capable of proof.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
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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.
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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
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When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
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The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.
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Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.
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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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Books that children read but once are of scant service to them those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.
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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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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
Agnes Repplier
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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
Agnes Repplier
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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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The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
Agnes Repplier
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There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
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Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.
Agnes Repplier
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It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.
Agnes Repplier