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The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
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
Elements
Habitual
Humor
Frame
Must
Gravity
Mind
Element
Unexpected
Reasonable
Surprise
Startle
Essence
Embody
More quotes by Agnes Repplier
the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.
Agnes Repplier
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
Agnes Repplier
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.
Agnes Repplier
fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.
Agnes Repplier
There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
Agnes Repplier
There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.
Agnes Repplier
There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.
Agnes Repplier
This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.
Agnes Repplier
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
The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
Agnes Repplier
The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.
Agnes Repplier
If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
Agnes Repplier
Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.
Agnes Repplier
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
The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
Agnes Repplier
It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
Agnes Repplier
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.
Agnes Repplier
Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
Agnes Repplier
We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
Agnes Repplier
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