Agnes Repplier
It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.Collection: Pet
A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.Collection: Pet
Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.Collection: Humor
We cannot really love anyone with with whom we never laugh.Collection: Relationship
Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.Collection: Humor
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.Collection: Happiness
It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.Collection: Education
There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.
There is always a secret irritation about a laugh into which we cannot join.
The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.
The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.
The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
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.
Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about.
It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.Collection: Choices
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.Collection: Blessed
It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Confused
Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.Collection: Adam
People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.Collection: People
It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.Collection: Teacher
What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!Collection: Laughter
If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.Collection: Loss
No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.Collection: Men
Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.Collection: Teaching
The cure-alls of the present day are infinitely various and infinitely obliging. Applied psychology, autosuggestion, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are urged upon us by kindly, if not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power. Booklets of counsel on 'How to Get What We Want,' which is impossible; booklets on 'Visualization,' warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble.Collection: Simple
It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations, the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live, the crowding of each day with more work than it can profitably hold, which has cost us, among other things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Sunshine
There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.Collection: Fancy
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.Collection: Humor
The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.Collection: Knowledge
Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.Collection: Friendship
Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters.Collection: Passion
to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Dream
The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.Collection: Choices
Necessity knows no Sunday.Collection: Sunday
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.Collection: Travel
There are people who balk at small civilities on account of their manifest insincerity. ... It is better and more logical to accept all the polite phraseology which facilitates intercourse, and contributes to the sweetness of life. If we discarded the formal falsehoods which are the currency of conversation, we should not be one step nearer the vital things of truth.Collection: Sweetness Of Life
It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.Collection: Mind
If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.Collection: History
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 ruinCollection: Life