Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

Activity and sadness are incompatible.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war.

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

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

Talk less about the years to come, Live, love labor more today.

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

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.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

Common sense, alas in spite of our educational institutions, is a rare commodity.

There will always be romance in the world so long as there are young hearts in it.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.

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

As many suffer from too much as too little.

The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent. The bad will dig its own grave.

No work deserves to be criticized that has not much in it that deserves to be applauded.

Age, that acquaints us with infirmities in ourselves, should make us tender in our reprehension of weakness elsewhere.

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

An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.

By his provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to the sum of happiness as the gravest philosopher.

The less the difference, the greater the quarrel over it.

Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.

The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.

A great destiny needs a generous diet.... What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!

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

There are seaons when our passions have slept so long that we know not whether they still exist in us. So does flax forget that it is combustible when the fire is away from it.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it. [a predisposition to notice the beautiful, in everything.]

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

We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.

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

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

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.

Care, admitted as guest, quickly turns to be master.

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.

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.

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

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.

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