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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.

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
Moral
Inexperience
Nations
Backing
Strong
Equivalent
Change
Assurance
Without
Goodness
Needs
Pressure
Men
Law
Legislated
Within
Sanguine

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Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.
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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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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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To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
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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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it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.
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if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
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A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.
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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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It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.
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A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
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Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
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Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
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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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The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
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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 cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
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For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
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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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