327 Quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee

Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.

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.

The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose.

Resentments, carried too far, expose us to a fate analogous to that of the fish-hawk, when he strikes his talons too deep into a fish beyond his capacity to lift, and is carried under and drowned by it.

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

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

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

It is so natural for us to consider our presence as indispensable in the world, so long as we have much to do in it, that the wisdom of retiring wholly from employments in advanced life may be questioned. Certainly, he who does so is in danger of finding, before long, that he has only given up the occupation to which he has been accustomed, for the new business of calculating the period of his decease.

There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought.