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

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The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.
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It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.
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The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.
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Economics and ethics have little in common.
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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.
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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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Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word 'million' is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
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the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
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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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There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.
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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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We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
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It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.
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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
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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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It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
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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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When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
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