Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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 N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

103. “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 N. Bovee

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Women seldom forfeit their claims to respect to men whom they respect.”

— Christian N. Bovee

108. “Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.”

— Christian N. Bovee

109. “Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.”

— Christian N. Bovee

110. “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 N. Bovee

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Christian N. Bovee

112. “Care, admitted as guest, quickly turns to be master.”

— Christian N. Bovee

113. “Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.”

— Christian N. Bovee

114. “Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

115. “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 N. Bovee

116. “At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of swordplay of the mind. You pink your adversary, and he is forthwith dead; and then you deserve to be hung for it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

117. “We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

118. “Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.”

— Christian N. Bovee

119. “Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.”

— Christian N. Bovee

120. “Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.”

— Christian N. Bovee

121. “If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.”

— Christian N. Bovee

122. “Passion doesn’t look beyond the moment of its existence.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

125. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee

126. “God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.”

— Christian N. Bovee

127. “There are some weaknesses that are peculiar and distinctive to generous characters, as freckles are to a fair skin.”

— Christian N. Bovee

128. “The next best thing to being witty one’s self, is to be able to be able to quote another’s wit.”

— Christian N. Bovee

129. “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 N. Bovee

130. “Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.”

— Christian N. Bovee

131. “The heart contracts as the pocket expands.”

— Christian N. Bovee

132. “Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable...”

— Christian N. Bovee

133. “In a contest with a weaker party it is more honorable to yield than to force concession. Magnanimity becomes the strong.”

— Christian N. Bovee

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

137. “Dreamers are half-way men of thought, and men of thought are half-way men of action.”

— Christian N. Bovee

138. “There will always be romance in the world so long as there are young hearts in it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

Featured in: Romance Quotes

139. “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 N. Bovee

140. “Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.”

— Christian N. Bovee

141. “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 N. Bovee

142. “God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.”

— Christian N. Bovee

143. “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.”

— Christian N. Bovee

144. “The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

146. “The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.”

— Christian N. Bovee

147. “The use we make of our fortune determines its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

150. “There are ceremonious bows that repel one like a cudgel.”

— Christian N. Bovee