Agnes Repplier
It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.Collection: Race
The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.Collection: Cat
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.Collection: Humor
Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Loyalty
Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Friendship
I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.Collection: Men
fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.Collection: Play
The tourist may complain of other tourists; but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms; but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.Collection: Travel
Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Men
Economics and ethics have little in common.Collection: Littles
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.Collection: Dog
It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.Collection: Inspirational
Whatever has "wit enough to keep it sweet" defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.Collection: Sweet
The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.Collection: Past
whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Travel
It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.Collection: Charity
Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Strong
There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Intelligent
the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.Collection: Envy
real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.Collection: Real
The man who never tells an unpalatable truth 'at the wrong time' (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Appreciate
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?Collection: Music
A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.Collection: Cat
Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity.Collection: Inspiration
the tea-hour is the hour of peace ... strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle - a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.Collection: Cat
For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Thinking
abroad it is our habit to regard all other travelers in the light of personal and unpardonable grievances. They are intruders into our chosen realms of pleasure, they jar upon our sensibilities, they lessen our meager share of comforts, they are everywhere in our way, they are always an unnecessary feature in the landscape.Collection: Travel
A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.Collection: Dog
The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Strong
Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.Collection: Speech
Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.Collection: Knowledge
A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.Collection: Dog
The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.Collection: Inspirational
Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.Collection: Healing
There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.Collection: Law
Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.Collection: Shopping
A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.Collection: Peace
Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients.Collection: Love Is