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

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People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
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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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Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
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It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
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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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Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
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A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.
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If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.
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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.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.
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The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
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Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
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No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.
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Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.
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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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