American author (1820-1904)
It requires a great genius to flatter successfully a great personage. The common arts of adulation are thrown away upon the exalted. They are so accustomed to these that they take little notice.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Perhaps the heroic element in our natures is exhibited to the best advantage, not in going from success to success, and so on through a series of triumphs, but in gathering, on the very field of defeat itself, the materials for renewed efforts, and in proceeding, with no abatement of heart or energy, to form fresh designs upon the very ruins and ashes of blasted hopes. Yes, it is this indomitable persistence in a purpose, continued alike through defeat and success, that makes, more than aught else, the hero.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The thing most prejudicial to health is to be always thinking of it. It is, indeed, an indispensable requisite to the enjoyment of life and health, that little attention should be paid to little symptoms. One should not think himself dead until he is so.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A great destiny needs a generous diet.... What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The gayest young men make the gravest old men.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
We absolve a friend from gratitude when we remind him of a favor.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A failure usually establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Marriage, rightly concluded, is an incarnation of love--poetry expressed in action--a sweet embellishment of an otherwise prosaic existence.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Life, like some cities, is full of blind alleys, leading nowhere. The great art is to get and to keep out of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
attributed, Day's Collacon