327 Quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

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

Our courage is greater to dare a visible than an imagined danger. A visible danger rouses our energies to meet or avert it; a fancied peril appalls from its presenting nothing to be resisted. Thus, a panic is, usually, a sudden going over to the enemy of our imagination. All is then lost, for we have not only to fight against that enemy, but our imagination as well.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

Winter is the night of vegetation.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

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

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.