Christian Nestell Bovee
Christian Nestell Bovee
Christian Nestell Boveewas an epigrammatic New York writer. He was born in New York City...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
evil abuse satire
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
evil way poverty
Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.
gratitude evil lessons
It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.
evil doe belief
God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.
knowing evil desire
I desire to go through life knowing as little of evil in it as possible. To this end, I sometimes avoid looking too closely into the nature of things, studying them only so far as they seem to be good, and abandoning interest in them as soon as their darker feature begin to appear. The good only deserves a hearty interest.
men evil action
Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.
faith however themselves
They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.
influence relation circumstances
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.
next faith-in-god labor
Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.
life sugar fancy
Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.
running opposites quality
Qualities not regulated run into their opposites. Economy before competence is meanness after it. Therefore economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.
witty self able
The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.
yield mistress favors
Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.
fate hawks resentment
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.