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

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Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
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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 was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.
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Friendship takes time.
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The tourist may complain of other tourists but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.
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It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
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I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.
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There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
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History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
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The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.
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It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.
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People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
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We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.
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The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.
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Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.
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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.
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The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
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To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.
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Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. ... under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
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