Top 150 Agnes Repplier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.”

— Agnes Repplier

2. “It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”

— Agnes Repplier

3. “Friendship takes time.”

— Agnes Repplier

4. “Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.”

— Agnes Repplier

5. “People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.”

— Agnes Repplier

6. “Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.”

— Agnes Repplier

7. “When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.”

— Agnes Repplier

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.”

— Agnes Repplier

11. “We may fail of our happiness, strive we ever so bravely; but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgement our chances and our capabilities.”

— Agnes Repplier

12. “Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.”

— Agnes Repplier

13. “Necessity knows no Sunday.”

— Agnes Repplier

14. “No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.”

— Agnes Repplier

15. “People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.”

— Agnes Repplier

16. “Humor brings insight and tolerance.”

— Agnes Repplier

17. “Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.”

— Agnes Repplier

18. “There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.”

— Agnes Repplier

19. “The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.”

— Agnes Repplier

20. “Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.”

— Agnes Repplier

21. “We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.”

— Agnes Repplier

22. “It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.”

— Agnes Repplier

23. “It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.”

— Agnes Repplier

24. “Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients...”

— Agnes Repplier

25. “There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

— Agnes Repplier

26. “The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.”

— Agnes Repplier

27. “A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.”

— Agnes Repplier

28. “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.”

— Agnes Repplier

29. “Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”

— Agnes Repplier

30. “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

31. “The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced.”

— Agnes Repplier

32. “This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.”

— Agnes Repplier

33. “Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.”

— Agnes Repplier

34. “No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.”

— Agnes Repplier

35. “Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.”

— Agnes Repplier

36. “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

37. “The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.”

— Agnes Repplier

38. “The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.”

— Agnes Repplier

39. “In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.”

— Agnes Repplier

40. “A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.”

— Agnes Repplier

41. “A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.”

— Agnes Repplier

42. “It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.”

— Agnes Repplier

43. “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

44. “A kitten is the most irresistible comedian in the world. Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder and mirth. It darts madly at nothing at all, and then, as though suddenly checked in the pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs with ridiculous agility and zeal.”

— Agnes Repplier

45. “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

46. “We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.”

— Agnes Repplier

47. “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

48. “It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.”

— Agnes Repplier

49. “Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.”

— Agnes Repplier

50. “I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.”

— Agnes Repplier