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We take life too seriously: the office of wit is to correct this tendency.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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Christian Nestell Bovee
Age: 83 †
Born: 1820
Born: February 22
Died: 1904
Died: January 18
Poet
New York City
New York
bovee
C. N. Bovee
Wit
Tendencies
Correct
Seriously
Office
Take
Life
Tendency
More quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee
Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
It is the life of democracy to favor equality.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Tranquil pleasures last the longest we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong he has a thousand who has overcome it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.
Christian Nestell Bovee
There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.
Christian Nestell Bovee
The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Vanity in an old man is charming. It is a proof of an open, nature. Eighty winters have not frozen him up, or taught him concealments. In a young person it is simply allowable we do not expect him to be above it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
Christian Nestell Bovee
A great destiny needs a generous diet.... What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!
Christian Nestell Bovee
Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!
Christian Nestell Bovee
