Quotes by Christian Bovee

• The great artist is a slave to his ideals.
• Wine is a treacherous friend who you must always be on guard for.
• When all else is lost, the future still remains.
• We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.
• We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.
• We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.
• Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
• There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.
• The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.
• The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.
• The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.
• They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.
• The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.
• As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.
• A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.
• Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
• Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave.
• Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.
• Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.
• Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised.
• False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
• Fame - a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.
• Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
• Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.
• Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.
• Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.
• It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.
• It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
• 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.
• Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.
• Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.
• In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.
• The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.
• Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.
• No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
• A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.
• Tears are nature's lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.
• Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.
• Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.
• Our first and last love is self-love.
• Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.
• Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity.