Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Winter is the night of vegetation.”

— Christian N. Bovee

152. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

155. “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

156. “Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders.”

— Christian N. Bovee

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

160. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

162. “Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.”

— Christian N. Bovee

163. “Mortal beauty stings while it delights.”

— Christian N. Bovee

164. “Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.”

— Christian N. Bovee

165. “The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.”

— Christian N. Bovee

166. “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 N. Bovee

167. “Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.”

— Christian N. Bovee

168. “The less the difference, the greater the quarrel over it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

169. “To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.”

— Christian N. Bovee

170. “Dignity of position adds to dignity of character, as well as to dignity of carriage. Give us a proud position, and we are impelled to act up to it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

171. “It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.”

— Christian N. Bovee

172. “Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.”

— Christian N. Bovee

173. “No work deserves to be criticized that has not much in it that deserves to be applauded.”

— Christian N. Bovee

174. “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 N. Bovee

175. “When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.”

— Christian N. Bovee

176. “Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and – prayer.”

— Christian N. Bovee

177. “An eager pursuit of fortune is inconsistent with a severe devotion to truth. The heart must grow tranquil before the thought can become searching.”

— Christian N. Bovee

178. “Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself, – like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.”

— Christian N. Bovee

179. “Examples are few of men ruined by giving.”

— Christian N. Bovee

180. “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 N. Bovee

181. “The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.”

— Christian N. Bovee

182. “The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.”

— Christian N. Bovee

183. “All power is indeed weak compared with that of the thinker. He sits upon the throne of his Empire of Thought, mightier far than they who wield material sceptres.”

— Christian N. Bovee

184. “Our opinions partake, more or less, of the prejudices of our class, party, or sect. We are all largely pledged, through interest, affection, or passion, to particular classes of opinion, and the strength of efforts to get released from these pledges, is the measure of our advancement.”

— Christian N. Bovee

185. “To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world – without friends or country, home or kindred.”

— Christian N. Bovee

186. “Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome them, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion.”

— Christian N. Bovee

187. “By his provocations to good-natured merriment, a humorist of the first water contributes as much to the sum of happiness as the gravest philosopher.”

— Christian N. Bovee

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

188. “The reveries of the dreamer advance his hopes, but not their realization. One good hour of earnest work is worth them all.”

— Christian N. Bovee

189. “It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

190. “Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, or heroism. St. Pierre To cultivate the sense of the beautiful, is one of the most effectual ways of cultivating an appreciation of the divine goodness.”

— Christian N. Bovee

191. “Justice, not the majority, should rule.”

— Christian N. Bovee

192. “The questions most furiously discussed are those which have in them a basis of truth, and yet a large admixture of errors. We inconsiderately take hold of, and mistakingly support or oppose them, as either wholly true or wholly false.”

— Christian N. Bovee

193. “The busiest of living agents are certain dead men’s thoughts.”

— Christian N. Bovee

194. “Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.”

— Christian N. Bovee

195. “It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.”

— Christian N. Bovee

196. “Beauty can afford to laugh at distinctions: it is itself the greatest distinction.”

— Christian N. Bovee

197. “In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer.”

— Christian N. Bovee

198. “There are seaons when our passions have slept so long that we know not whether they still exist in us. So does flax forget that it is combustible when the fire is away from it.”

— Christian N. Bovee

199. “The worth of a book is a matter of expressed juices.”

— Christian N. Bovee

200. “Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.”

— Christian N. Bovee