Top 200 Christian N. Bovee Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

159. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

162. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

164. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

166. “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

167. “Mortal beauty stings while it delights.”

— Christian N. Bovee

168. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

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

— Christian N. Bovee

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

191. “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

192. “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

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

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

— Christian N. Bovee

197. “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

198. “Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!”

— Christian N. Bovee

199. “Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love to day, than the felicities of heaven afar off.”

— Christian N. Bovee

200. “Character is very much a matter of health.”

— Christian N. Bovee