Top 100 Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes
#2. A particular disappointment is seldom more than an excrescence upon the trunk of a general good
a shower that spoils the pleasure party, but refreshes and enriches the earth.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#3. Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#4. Vanity in an old man is charming. It is a proof of an open, nature. Eighty winters have not frozen him up, or taught him concealments. In a young person it is simply allowable; we do not expect him to be above it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#6. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#7. Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#8. Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#9. Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?
Christian Nestell Bovee
#14. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#15. They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#16. To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world
without friends or country, home or kindred.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#17. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#18. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#21. Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#24. There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#29. Patience is only one faculty; earnestness the devotion of all the faculties. Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#31. We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#33. It is seldom that we find out how great are our resources until we are thrown upon them.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#34. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#39. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#40. Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?
Christian Nestell Bovee
#41. Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#47. Dignity of position adds to dignity of character, as well as to dignity of carriage. Give us a proud position, and we are impelled to act up to it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#49. At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of swordplay of the mind. You pink your adversary, and he is forthwith dead; and then you deserve to be hung for it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#51. Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#54. Ambition, in one respect, is like a singer's voice; pitched at too high a key, it breaks and comes to nothing.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#60. Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#61. Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#62. We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime
Christian Nestell Bovee
#65. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#66. Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#67. Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#68. The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#69. The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#70. Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#71. The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#73. Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable ...
Christian Nestell Bovee
#74. A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#75. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#77. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#78. The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#79. The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#80. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#81. Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#82. The light in the world comes principally from two sources,-the sun, and the student's lamp.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#85. It is curious to what a degree one may become attached to a fine tree, especially when it is placed where trees are rare.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#86. An eager pursuit of fortune is inconsistent with a severe devotion to truth. The heart must grow tranquil before the thought can become searching.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#87. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#88. The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#89. Very handsome women have usually far less sensibility to compliments than their less beautiful sisters.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#91. Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#92. Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#93. A better principle than this, that "the majority shall rule," is this other, that justice shall rule. "Justice," says the code of Justinian, "is the constant and perpetual desire to render every man his due.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#95. The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#96. No work deserves to be criticized that has not much in it that deserves to be applauded.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#100. 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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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