Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes - Page 9

Elements of the heroic exist in almost every individual: it is only the felicitous development of them all in one that is rare.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

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.

The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.

God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.

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.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.

He half retrieves a defeat who yields to it gracefully.

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.

Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.

The use we make of our fortune determines its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly.

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.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

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

Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.

The activity of the young is like that of railcars in motion--they tear along with noise and turmoil, and leave peace behind them. The quietest nooks, invaded by them, lose their quietude as they pass, and recover it only on their departure.

A good thought is indeed a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked; next he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the friend who is the first to quote it to us. Whoever adopts and circulates a just thought, participates in the merit that originated it.

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself. The judicious quoter, too, helps on what is much needed in the world, a freer circulation of good thoughts, pure feelings, and pleasant fancies.

It is safer to quote what is written than what is spoken. What a man writes it is fair to presume he believes as a matter of general conviction, but it is not so with what he utters in the freedom of conversation. In that he may only express the feeling of the moment, and not his settled judgment, or matured opinion.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

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.

It is in vain that he seeks dominion abroad, who is not kingly at home.