226 Quotes by Agnes Repplier

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

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.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

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.

It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

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

Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.