Christian nestell bovee quotes

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.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

As many suffer from too much as too little.

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship into port may blow another off shore.

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.

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.

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

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great.

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

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

Winter is the night of vegetation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

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

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

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

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.

Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.

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

Some one called Sir Richard Steele the "vilest of mankind," and he retorted with proud humility, "It would be a glorious world if I were.

The heart contracts as the pocket expands.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.

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

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

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

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

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

Examples are few of men ruined by giving.

Fame - a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.

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

Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

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

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war.

It is of very little use in trying to be dignified, if dignity is no part of your character.

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.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection, - these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss.

Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.

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

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.

Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.

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

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

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

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

In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less

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

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!

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.

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

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.

Activity and sadness are incompatible.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice

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

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity.

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Our first and last love is self-love.

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

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

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.

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.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

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

Better freedom with a crust, than slavery with every luxury.

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

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

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

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.

If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.

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

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.

Give me the character and I will forecast the event.

Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

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

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

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

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.

The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.

Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.

Sorrow is never more sorrowful than when it jests at its own misery.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

Example has far more followers than reason.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.

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

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.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.

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

A great destiny needs a generous diet.... What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!

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.

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

Books are embalmed minds.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

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.

It is difficult to say which is the greatest evil--to have too violent passions, or to be wholly devoid of them. Controlled with firmness, guided by discretion, and hallowed by the imagination, the passions are the vivifiers and quickeners of our being. Without passion there can be no energy of character. Indeed, the passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways, and dangerous only in one--through their excess.

New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.

It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.

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

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

Age, that acquaints us with infirmities in ourselves, should make us tender in our reprehension of weakness elsewhere.

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.

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

There is a German proverb which says that Take-it-Easy and Live-Long are brothers.

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

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

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.