Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them in particular, what we compare them to.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.

Christian Nestell Bovee
In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less

Christian Nestell Bovee
In the assurance of strength there is strength; and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers.

Christian Nestell Bovee
"There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection,—these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Loose ideas on the subject of business will not answer. It must be reduced to something of a science. It has its principles, upon a knowledge and an application of which, success in it mainly depends.

Christian Nestell Bovee
How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Christian Nestell Bovee
The best evidence of merit is a cordial recognition of it whenever and wherever it may be found.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
We repose too much upon the actual, when we should be seeking to develop the possibilities of our being. It is true of nearly all of us, that what we have done is little compared with what we might have accomplished, or may hereafter effect.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.

Christian Nestell Bovee
However much of time, labor, or other means it takes to establish a reputation, it frequently happens that it requires nearly as much to maintain it. One who has written a good book, is expected on all occasions to "talk like a book." Or, if one has achieved an act of heroism, he is expected to perform acts of heroism for the edification of all who approach him. There are people who can never believe they see a lion unless they hear him roar.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
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.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Who aspires to remain leader must keep in advance of his column. His fear must not play traitor to his occasions. The instant he falls into line with his followers, a bolder spirit may throw himself at the head of the movement initiated, and in that moment his leadership is gone.

Christian Nestell Bovee
One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

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

Christian Nestell Bovee
The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose.

Christian Nestell Bovee
Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Christian Nestell Bovee
The light in the world comes principally from two sources,—the sun, and the student's lamp.

Christian Nestell Bovee
The first step toward greatness is to be honest, says the proverb; but the proverb fails to state the case strong enough. Honesty is not only "the first step toward greatness," — it is greatness itself.

Christian Nestell Bovee