Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

Marriage, by making us more contented, causes us often to be less enterprising.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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
What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.

Christian Nestell Bovee
The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

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

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

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
Thus, a panic is, usually, a sudden going over to the enemy of our imagination. All is then lost, for we have not only to fight against that enemy, but our imagination as well.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Pride is like the beautiful acacia, that lifts its head proudly above its neighbor plants-forgetting that it too, like them, has its roots in the dirt.

Christian Nestell Bovee
We should be sure, when we rebuke a want of charity, to do it with charity.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, Doubt (called the father of inventions by Galileo), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

Christian Nestell Bovee
Melancholy sees the worst of things,—things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.

Christian Nestell Bovee
What a man knows should find its expression in what he does. The value of superior knowledge is chiefly in that it leads to a performing manhood.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
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