Christian Nestell Bovee (February 22, 1820 – January 18, 1904) was an epigrammatic New York City writer. He was born in New York City.
It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.
We may learn from children how large a part of our grievances is imaginary. But the pain is just as real.
Few minds wear out; more rust out.
Elements of the heroic exist in almost every individual: it is only the felicitous development of them all in one that is rare.
Pride is like the beautiful acacia, that lifts its head proudly above its neighbor plants-forgetting that it too, like them, has its roots in the dirt.
The worth of a book is a matter of expressed juices.
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.
A good thought is indeed a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked; next he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the friend who is the first to quote it to us. Whoever adopts and circulates a just thought, participates in the merit that originated it.
A great destiny needs a generous diet. . . . What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!
Melancholy sees the worst of things, things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull.
A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.
Rejecting the miracles of Christ, we still have the miracle of Christ Himself.
Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.
The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.
A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
Constant companionship is not enjoyable, any more than constant eating. We sit too long at the table of friendship, when we outsit our appetites for each other's thoughts.
He has but one great fear that fears to do wrong.
Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome them, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion.
How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!