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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.

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
Circumstances
Pessimism
Imagine
Units
Words
Modest
Pain
Proper
Remorseless
Change
Degree
Soften
Doe
Degrees
Presume
Men
Mere
Unit
Fate
Pessimist

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

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There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
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
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If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.
Agnes Repplier
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the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
Agnes Repplier
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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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The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
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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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.
Agnes Repplier
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By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.
Agnes Repplier
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The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
Agnes Repplier
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A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
Agnes Repplier
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Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
Agnes Repplier
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The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.
Agnes Repplier
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Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.
Agnes Repplier