Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.

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.

Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties.

The worst deluded are the self-deluded.

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.

The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

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

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.

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.

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

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

We give our best affections to the beautiful, only our second best to the useful.

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

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

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

Genuine religion is matter of feeling rather than matter of opinion.

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

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.

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

Mortal beauty stings while it delights.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff's pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

Examples are few of men ruined by giving.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

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.

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

No single character is ever so great that a nation can afford to form itself upon it. Imitation belittles. This appears in the instance of the Chinese. The Chinese are so many Confucii; in miniature. And so with the Jews. Moses, the lawgiver, is poorly represented by Moses, the old clothesman ; or even by Dives, the hanker.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.

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.

Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

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

The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it--to realize it to the full--to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

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

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

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

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

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

Hope is the best part of our riches.

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.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

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.

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

Activity and sadness are incompatible.

Winter is the night of vegetation.