Quotes from Christian Nestell Bovee

Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.

In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.

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

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

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

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

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

Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

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

It may almost be held that the hope of commercial gain has done nearly as much for the cause of truth as even the love of truth.

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.

A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

We cannot reason ourselves into love, nor can we reason ourselves out of it, which suggests that love and reason have little to do with each other.

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

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

Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love to day, than the felicities of heaven afar off.

The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.

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

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

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

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

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