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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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Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Reality
Backward
Look
Enables
Looks
Realities
Compare
Recollections
Permanent
Deceptive
Mental
Comparing
Illusion
Recollection
Process
Complacency

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The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.
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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
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Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.
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The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
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Wit is a thing capable of proof.
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Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
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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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Bargaining is essential to the life of the world but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
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There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
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There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.
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But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.
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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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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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We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.
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the tea-hour is the hour of peace ... strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle - a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
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Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.
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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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Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
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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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An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.
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