Top 315 Quotes & Sayings by Christian Nestell Bovee - Page 2

Patience is only one faculty; earnestness the devotion of all the faculties. Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them.

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

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

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

The heart contracts as the pocket expands.

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

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

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

It is indeed a misfortune for a woman to be without beauty, as with men the eye is the chief arbiter of qualities in the sex. Her beauty is her capital--her worth in the market matrimonial depends upon it. With her the Virtues are less reverenced when unaccompanied by the Graces. The sex understand this very well; and hence they seek mainly to make captive the eye, knowing the mind and heart will follow as a matter of course.

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

It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Talk less about the years to come, Live, love labor more today.

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.

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

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

To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world--without friends or country, home or kindred.

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

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

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

It is so natural for us to consider our presence as indispensable in the world, so long as we have much to do in it, that the wisdom of retiring wholly from employments in advanced life may be questioned. Certainly, he who does so is in danger of finding, before long, that he has only given up the occupation to which he has been accustomed, for the new business of calculating the period of his decease.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Example has far more followers than reason.

He must put his whole life into his work, who would do it well, and make it potential to influence other lives.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

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.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.

Give me the character and I will forecast the event.

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.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it. [a predisposition to notice the beautiful, in everything.]

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.

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

Examples are few of men ruined by giving.

There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes. GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, The Reflections of Lichtenberg We become familiar with the outsides of men, as with the outsides of houses, and think we know them, while we are ignorant of so much that is passing within them.

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

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

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

Melancholy sees the worst of things...[rather than the best]

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

Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.

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

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

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

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.

Something of a person's character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

There are some kinds of men who cannot pass their time alone; they are the flails of occupied people.(Bonald, M.} There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.

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

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

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

Common sense, alas in spite of our educational institutions, is a rare commodity.