Education Quote by Agnes Repplier

Repplier is skewering the utilitarian fantasy that conversation is a kind of informal classroom, where the point is to come away with tidy, bankable knowledge. Her distinction is almost mischievously dismissive: what enriches us is not the “what” at all, but the charge of minds brushing up against each other at speed. “Swift contact” does the heavy lifting. It suggests flirtation more than lecture, electricity more than instruction - and it quietly reframes conversation as an aesthetic experience, not a transaction.

The subtext is a defense of sociability against the age’s growing obsession with measurable outcomes. Repplier wrote in a world increasingly organized by expertise, efficiency, and systems; to insist on “tingling currents of thought” is to argue for the value of the unproductive, the unsummarizable. You can’t footnote elation. You can’t convert it cleanly into a takeaway. That’s the point: the enrichment is felt, not filed.

Her phrasing also flatters the reader while warning them. Real conversation, in her view, is not merely exchanging opinions but risking velocity: being quickened by another person’s intelligence, having your own thinking jolted into motion. The “currents” metaphor implies flow, interruption, cross-contamination. It’s implicitly anti-monologue and anti-performative: if you’re only waiting to talk, you get information at best; you miss the electricity.

In an era when “networking” and “content” threaten to turn talk into extractive labor, Repplier’s line lands as a reminder that the best conversations don’t optimize you - they animate you.