Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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 N. Bovee

102. “The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.”

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

104. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

108. “Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.”

— Christian N. Bovee

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

120. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

125. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

127. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

138. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

141. “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

142. “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

143. “Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.”

— Christian N. Bovee

144. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

146. “Winter is the night of vegetation.”

— Christian N. Bovee

147. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

149. “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

150. “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