Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.”

— Christian N. Bovee

52. “Bad taste is a species of bad morals.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

54. “Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.”

— Christian N. Bovee

55. “Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection, these are love’s pretty ingredients for a kiss.”

— Christian N. Bovee

56. “Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.”

— Christian N. Bovee

57. “Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.”

— Christian N. Bovee

58. “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 N. Bovee

59. “Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.”

— Christian N. Bovee

60. “Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

62. “A book should be luminous not voluminous.”

— Christian N. Bovee

63. “Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.”

— Christian N. Bovee

64. “Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.”

— Christian N. Bovee

65. “Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.”

— Christian N. Bovee

66. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee

67. “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 N. Bovee

68. “The very cunning conceal their cunning; the indifferently shrewd boast of it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

69. “Loss of sincerity is loss of vital power.”

— Christian N. Bovee

70. “It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.”

— Christian N. Bovee

71. “Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.”

— Christian N. Bovee

72. “Dishonest people conceal their faults from themselves as well as others, honest people know and confess them.”

— Christian N. Bovee

73. “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 N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

75. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee

76. “All good writing leaves something unexpressed.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

78. “In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less.”

— Christian N. Bovee

79. “He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself. The judicious quoter, too, helps on what is much needed in the world, a freer circulation of good thoughts, pure feelings, and pleasant fancies.”

— Christian N. Bovee

80. “An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.”

— Christian N. Bovee

81. “Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.”

— Christian N. Bovee

82. “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 N. Bovee

83. “Something of a person’s character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.”

— Christian N. Bovee

84. “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 N. Bovee

85. “The best evidence of merit is a cordial recognition of it whenever and wherever it may be found.”

— Christian N. Bovee

86. “A woman’s love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.”

— Christian N. Bovee

87. “It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.”

— Christian N. Bovee

88. “Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

90. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee

91. “Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

93. “Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

96. “A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.”

— Christian N. Bovee

97. “Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.”

— Christian N. Bovee

98. “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 N. Bovee

99. “Hope is the best part of our riches.”

— Christian N. Bovee

100. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee