Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes - Page 12

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

When we get tired of enjoying all the pleasures within our reach, we have still a resource in thinking of others that are not.

Six traits of effective leaders: 1. Make others feel important 2. Promote a vision 3. Follow the golden rule 4. Admit mistakes 5. Criticize others only in private 6. Stay close to the action Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

Passion doesn't look beyond the moment of its existence.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.

There are none so low but they have their triumphs. Small successes suffice for small souls.

He has but one great fear that fears to do wrong.

The first step toward greatness is to be honest, says the proverb; but the proverb fails to state the case strong enough. Honesty is not only "the first step toward greatness," - it is greatness itself.

Melancholy sees the worst of things, things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.

"There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought.

It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.

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.

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.

Pure motives do not insure perfect results.

The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.

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.

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

Genuine religion is matter of feeling rather than matter of opinion.

Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. "The great felicity of life," says Seneca, "is to be without perturbations.

The extent of poverty in the world is much exaggerated. Our sensitiveness makes half our poverty; our fears--anxieties for ills that never happen--a greater part of the other half.

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words.

Constant companionship is not enjoyable, any more than constant eating. We sit too long at the table of friendship, when we outsit our appetites for each other's thoughts.