Christian Nestell Bovee

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater, ennoble 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.

One who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do. He has lain down to die. The grass is already growing over him.

The use we make of our fortune determines as to its sufficiency. A little is enough if used wisely, and too much if expended foolishly.

Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a congenial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.

One who is contented with what he has done will never become famous for what he will do. He has lain down to die, and the grass is already growing over him.

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Our first love and last love is - self-love.

There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety.

Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.

‘Tis but a short journey across the isthmus of Now.

Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.

To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.

The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts; they are forever influencing the opinions and destinies of men.

To cultivate the sense of the beautiful is but one, and the most effectual, of the ways of cultivating an appreciation of the Divine goodness.

The cheerful live longest in years and afterwards in regards. Cheerfulness is the often offshoot of goodness.

To quote copiously and well requires taste, judgment and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.

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.

Tranquil pleasures last the longest.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

The language of the heart which comes from the heart and goes to the heart - is always simple, graceful, and full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language, difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.