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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
Must
Gravity
Mind
Element
Unexpected
Reasonable
Surprise
Startle
Essence
Embody
Elements
Habitual
Humor
Frame

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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.
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Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
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Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
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There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.
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In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
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The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.
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It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
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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.
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Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity.
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Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.
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There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
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We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
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The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.
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The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.
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Wit is a thing capable of proof.
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America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
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It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.
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the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.
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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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Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.
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