Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered

Loss of sincerity is loss of vital power.

Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, or heroism. St. Pierre To cultivate the sense of the beautiful, is one of the most effectual ways of cultivating an appreciation of the divine goodness.

Elements of the heroic exist in almost every individual: it is only the felicitous development of them all in one that is rare.

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.

The beauty of a woman transcends all other forms of beauty, as well in the sweetness of its suggestions, as in the fervor of the admiration it awakens. The beauty of a lovely woman is an inspiration, a sweet delirium, a gentle madness. Her looks are love-potions. Heaven itself is never so clearly revealed to us as in the face of a beautiful woman.

Some one called Sir Richard Steele the "vilest of mankind," and he retorted with proud humility, "It would be a glorious world if I were.

There is no sense of weariness like that which closes in a day of eager and unintermittent pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten, but "the core sticks in the throat." Expectation has then given way to ennui, appetite to satiety.

Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.

It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.

To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.

Ambitious princes value inherited kingdoms not so much as conquered provinces.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice

Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!

There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

The language of the heart
the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"
is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language
difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts.

The use we make of our fortune determines its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly.

Our first and last love is self-love.

Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.

Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome them, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion.

Something of a person's character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.

Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words.

Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.

Dreamers are half-way men of thought, and men of thought are half-way men of action.

Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

The extent of poverty in the world is much exaggerated. Our sensitiveness makes half our poverty; our fears
anxieties for ills that never happen
a greater part of the other half.

Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

Qualities not regulated run into their opposites. Economy before competence is meanness after it. Therefore economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

In a contest with a weaker party it is more honorable to yield than to force concession. Magnanimity becomes the strong.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought.

Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties.

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.

Out of politics comes more uproar than progress. It is indeed surprising how little, comparatively, this noisy department of human affairs contributes to the world's prosperity. Political commotions upon the grandest scale, political events of astounding suddenness, political characters of the greatest ability, abound, but still, permanent results are rare, and we look in vain for a measure of public good corresponding in extent to the hideous rout which ushers it in. Progress but turns upon its pillow, and goes to sleep again.

Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.

Many an honest man practices upon himself an amount of deceit sufficient, if practised upon another, and in a little different way, to send him to the state prison.

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.

Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.

Character is very much a matter of health.

God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.

Passion doesn't look beyond the moment of its existence.

The highest excellence is seldom attained in more than one vocation. The roads leading to distinction in separate pursuits diverge, and the nearer we approach the one, the farther we recede from the other.

He half retrieves a defeat who yields to it gracefully.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

The best evidence of merit is a cordial recognition of it whenever and wherever it may be found.

I once asked a distinguished artist what place he gave to labor in art. "Labor," he in effect said, "is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art." Turning then to another
"And you," I inquired, "what do you consider as the great force in art?" "Love," he replied. In their two answers I found but one truth.

Ambition, in one respect, is like a singer's voice; pitched at too high a key, it breaks and comes to nothing.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity.

However much of time, labor, or other means it takes to establish a reputation, it frequently happens that it requires nearly as much to maintain it. One who has written a good book, is expected on all occasions to "talk like a book." Or, if one has achieved an act of heroism, he is expected to perform acts of heroism for the edification of all who approach him. There are people who can never believe they see a lion unless they hear him roar.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

We absolve a friend from gratitude when we remind him of a favor.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.

We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

It is of very little use in trying to be dignified, if dignity is no part of your character.

As many suffer from too much as too little.

Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.

Very handsome women have usually far less sensibility to compliments than their less beautiful sisters.

The worth of a book is a matter of expressed juices.

It is with charity as with money
the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

Give me the character and I will forecast the event.

The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose.

What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.

Justice, not the majority, should rule.

To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.

The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.

When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.

It is seldom that we find out how great are our resources until we are thrown upon them.

Example has far more followers than reason.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.