Quote

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.

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
Need
Knowledge
Discuss
Needs
Values
Stem
Mind
Less
Processes
Reticence
Process
Falls
Digestion
Fall
Charm
Sobriety
Find
Fruit
Ordered
Wells
Value
Eaten
Well
Tree
Ripe

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

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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.
Agnes Repplier
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Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier
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It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
Agnes Repplier
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There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
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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An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.
Agnes Repplier
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I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
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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Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.
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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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.
Agnes Repplier
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People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
Agnes Repplier
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Whatever has wit enough to keep it sweet defies corruption and outlasts all time but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
Agnes Repplier
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Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
Agnes Repplier
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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.
Agnes Repplier
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In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin
Agnes Repplier
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He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
Agnes Repplier