Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

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

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

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

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

Character is very much a matter of health.

Dishonesty is a forsaking of permanent for temporary advantages.

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

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

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

Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.

Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.

Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. "The great felicity of life," says Seneca, "is to be without perturbations.

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.

It is easier to die bravely than to live so.

The method of the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the subject and--his own discrimination.

It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.

It is invidious to distinguish particular men as adventurers: we are all such.

Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment.

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

An ambition to excel in petty things obstructs the progress to nobler aims.

A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.

The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.

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.

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.

Besides the five senses, there is a sixth sense, of equal importance--the sense of duty.

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

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.

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

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.

When we get tired of enjoying all the pleasures within our reach, we have still a resource in thinking of others that are not.

Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.

Books are embalmed minds.

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

The loss of a beloved connection awakens an interest in Heaven before unfelt.

Woman's power is over the affections. A beautiful dominion is hers; but she risks its forfeiture when she seeks to extend it.

To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

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

Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love to day, than the felicities of heaven afar off.

It is with a company as it is with a punch, everything depends upon the ingredients of which it in composed.

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

Women seldom forfeit their claims to respect to men whom they respect.

Constant companionship is not enjoyable, any more than constant eating. We sit too long at the table of friendship, when we outsit our appetites for each other's thoughts.

He half retrieves a defeat who yields to it gracefully.

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

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

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.

To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.