327 Quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.

It is easier to die bravely than to live so.

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.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.