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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
Tendencies
Correct
Seriously
Office
Take
Life
Tendency
Wit

More quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee

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Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.
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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.
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No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
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A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.
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The light in the world comes principally from two sources,-the sun, and the student's lamp.
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Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.
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Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.
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The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.
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It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.
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We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime
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There are some weaknesses that are peculiar and distinctive to generous characters, as freckles are to a fair skin.
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Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?
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The very cunning conceal their cunning the indifferently shrewd boast of it.
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Tranquil pleasures last the longest we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
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A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
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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.
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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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.
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Rejecting the miracles of Christ, we still have the miracle of Christ Himself.
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Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.
Christian Nestell Bovee