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If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
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
Disgrace
Distinction
Written
Also
Book
Writing
Good
More quotes by Christian Nestell Bovee
The method of the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the subject and--his own discrimination.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
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
The very cunning conceal their cunning the indifferently shrewd boast of it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Neither love nor ambition, as it has often been shown, can brook a division of its empire in the heart.
Christian Nestell Bovee
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.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Genuine religion is matter of feeling rather than matter of opinion.
Christian Nestell Bovee
The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent. The bad will dig its own grave, and the imperfect may safely be left to that final neglect from which no amount of present undeserved popularity can rescue it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Dishonesty is a forsaking of permanent for temporary advantages.
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
Passion doesn't look beyond the moment of its existence.
Christian Nestell Bovee
A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
Christian Nestell Bovee
To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.
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
Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!
Christian Nestell Bovee
Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.
Christian Nestell Bovee
We cannot reason ourselves into love, nor can we reason ourselves out of it, which suggests that love and reason have little to do with each other.
Christian Nestell Bovee
Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.
Christian Nestell Bovee
