Top 150 Agnes Repplier Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Agnes Repplier

102. “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

103. “When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.”

— Agnes Repplier

104. “We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.”

— Agnes Repplier

105. “Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity...”

— Agnes Repplier

106. “Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.”

— Agnes Repplier

107. “The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.”

— Agnes Repplier

108. “A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.”

— Agnes Repplier

109. “The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.”

— Agnes Repplier

110. “A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.”

— Agnes Repplier

111. “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

112. “Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.”

— Agnes Repplier

113. “It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.”

— Agnes Repplier

114. “Wit is a thing capable of proof.”

— Agnes Repplier

115. “An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.”

— Agnes Repplier

116. “The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.”

— Agnes Repplier

117. “What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.”

— Agnes Repplier

118. “It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.”

— Agnes Repplier

119. “The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.”

— Agnes Repplier

120. “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

121. “We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.”

— Agnes Repplier

122. “It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.”

— Agnes Repplier

123. “While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.”

— Agnes Repplier

124. “Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.”

— Agnes Repplier

125. “What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?”

— Agnes Repplier

126. “Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.”

— Agnes Repplier

127. “The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.”

— Agnes Repplier

128. “The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.”

— Agnes Repplier

129. “Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.”

— Agnes Repplier

130. “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

131. “The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth.”

— Agnes Repplier

132. “A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.”

— Agnes Repplier

133. “Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.”

— Agnes Repplier

134. “The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.”

— Agnes Repplier

135. “Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.”

— Agnes Repplier

136. “Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.”

— Agnes Repplier

137. “Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.”

— Agnes Repplier

138. “For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.”

— Agnes Repplier

139. “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.”

— Agnes Repplier

140. “The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.”

— Agnes Repplier

141. “To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.”

— Agnes Repplier

142. “The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.”

— Agnes Repplier

143. “Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.”

— Agnes Repplier

144. “Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.”

— Agnes Repplier

145. “The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.”

— Agnes Repplier

146. “The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.”

— Agnes Repplier

147. “Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.”

— Agnes Repplier

148. “Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.”

— Agnes Repplier

149. “It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.”

— Agnes Repplier

150. “Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.”

— Agnes Repplier