Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

104. “Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.”

— Christian N. Bovee

105. “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

106. “The finest compliment that can be paid to a woman of sense is to address her as such.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

108. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— 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. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Besides the five senses, there is a sixth sense, of equal importance – the sense of duty.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

122. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

132. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

135. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

137. “Many an honest man practices upon himself an amount of deceit sufficient, if practised upon another, and in a little different way, to send him to the state prison.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

139. “Winter is the night of vegetation.”

— Christian N. Bovee

140. “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 N. Bovee

141. “We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.”

— Christian N. Bovee

142. “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 N. Bovee

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

146. “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

147. “Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment.”

— Christian N. Bovee

148. “Genuine religion is matter of feeling rather than matter of opinion.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

150. “Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.”

— Christian N. Bovee