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The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

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
Past
Delusions
Seems
Fond
Sane
Delusion
Subtle
Foolish
Seem
Present

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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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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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Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
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The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
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I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.
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A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
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To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.
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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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the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.
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to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.
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There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
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It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
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There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.
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Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?
Agnes Repplier
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It is in his pleasure that a man really lives it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
Agnes Repplier
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Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
Agnes Repplier
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Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring - or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps - lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.
Agnes Repplier