Quotes from bovee christian nestell vii

Kindness: A language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand.

Hunting is a relic of the barbarism that once thirsted for human blood, but is now content with the blood of animals.

We absolve a friend from gratitude when we remind him of a favor.

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

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives it its sweetness: it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

If necessity is the mother of invention, it is no less the mother of crime; eternal justice is one thing, eternal love of bread and butter and other good things another; where it is a necessity of our nature to have, it is a weakness of our being to get.

Only the optimist looks wisely on life. Though the actual world is not to his liking, it is the happiness of the optimist to carry a nobler in his thought.

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

Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.

The gayest young men make the gravest old men.

The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation.

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

To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.

At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of sword-play of the mind. You pink your adversary and he is forthwith dead: and then you deserve to be hung for it.

The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story.

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

It is of little use to quarrel with particular fashions, however absurd. Fashionable follies seldom stand their ground long enough to be made the objects of serious attack. And where they give way to it, it is only to reappear in some new guise.