Christian Nestell Bovee Quotations

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

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.

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Tears are nature's lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.

Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.

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

Wine is a treacherous friend who you must always be on guard for.

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

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

Fame - a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.

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

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

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.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

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.

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.

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

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

They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.

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

The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.

Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.

Resentments, carried too far, expose us to a fate analogous to that of the fish-hawk, when he strikes his talons too deep into a fish beyond his capacity to lift, and is carried under and drowned by it.

It is so natural for us to consider our presence as indispensable in the world, so long as we have much to do in it, that the wisdom of retiring wholly from employments in advanced life may be questioned. Certainly, he who does so is in danger of finding, before long, that he has only given up the occupation to which he has been accustomed, for the new business of calculating the period of his decease.

Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.

Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.

In general, inquiry ceases when we adopt a theory. After that, we overlook whatever makes against it, and see and think, and talk and write, only in its favor. Indeed, when we have a snug, comfortable theory, to which we are much attached, they appear to us as a very mean set of facts that will not square with it.

All power is indeed weak compared with that of the thinker. He sits upon the throne of his Empire of Thought, mightier far than they who wield material sceptres.

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 curious to what a degree one may become attached to a fine tree, especially when it is placed where trees are rare.

Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.

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.

Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.

Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.

Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.

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.

We cannot reason ourselves into love, nor can we reason ourselves out of it, which suggests that love and reason have little to do with each other.

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

Successful minds work like a gimlet--to a single point.

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.

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.

Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power--that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision.

Our opinions partake, more or less, of the prejudices of our class, party, or sect. We are all largely pledged, through interest, affection, or passion, to particular classes of opinion, and the strength of efforts to get released from these pledges, is the measure of our advancement.

Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

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

The activity of the young is like that of railcars in motion--they tear along with noise and turmoil, and leave peace behind them. The quietest nooks, invaded by them, lose their quietude as they pass, and recover it only on their departure.

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

It is in vain that he seeks dominion abroad, who is not kingly at home.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

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

In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer.

Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world--without friends or country, home or kindred.

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.

Sorrow is never more sorrowful than when it jests at its own misery.

If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.

The reveries of the dreamer advance his hopes, but not their realization. One good hour of earnest work is worth them all.

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

A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.

We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.

The finest compliment that can be paid to a woman of sense is to address her as such.

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

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.

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

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

He must put his whole life into his work, who would do it well, and make it potential to influence other lives.

There are none so low but they have their triumphs. Small successes suffice for small souls.

Who aspires to remain leader must keep in advance of his column. His fear must not play traitor to his occasions. The instant he falls into line with his followers, a bolder spirit may throw himself at the head of the movement initiated, and in that moment his leadership is gone.

Hard workers are usually honest; industry lifts them above temptation.

As many suffer from too much as too little.

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.