Life & Wisdom Quote by Agnes Repplier

“Edged tools” lands as more than shop talk: it’s Repplier’s tidy metaphor for any instrument that confers power without promising wisdom. A blade is useful precisely because it’s sharp; the danger isn’t an accident tacked on afterward, it’s built into the feature we prize. That’s what gives the line its bite: it refuses the comforting idea that harm comes only from misuse. Sometimes the very qualities that make a tool effective make it risky in ordinary hands.

Repplier wrote in an era that fetishized improvement - mass education, moral uplift, new technologies, new forms of public argument - while also producing fresh ways to injure: sensational journalism, social pressure campaigns, ideological certainty. As a writer steeped in essays and criticism, she’s likely pointing at language itself: rhetoric, satire, “just words” that can cut reputations, harden factions, or turn nuance into a weapon. The phrasing “not infrequently” is doing cultural work. It’s genteel understatement, the kind that signals a civilized speaker while quietly insisting the problem is common, not rare.

The subtext is a warning against moral swagger. People love sharp instruments because they promise clean results: a decisive argument, a quick reform, a clever put-down, a policy that slices through complexity. Repplier hints that the real hazard is the handler’s confidence. The line doesn’t ban tools; it asks for humility, training, and an awareness that precision has a price. In a public culture that rewards sharpness, she’s reminding us what sharpness does.