Christian Nestell Bovee Men Quotations

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.

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.

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.

The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.

The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts.

A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

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!

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

Women seldom forfeit their claims to respect to men whom they respect.

In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

Examples are few of men ruined by giving.

It is safer to quote what is written than what is spoken. What a man writes it is fair to presume he believes as a matter of general conviction, but it is not so with what he utters in the freedom of conversation. In that he may only express the feeling of the moment, and not his settled judgment, or matured opinion.

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.

Many an honest man practices upon himself an amount of deceit sufficient, if practised upon another, and in a little different way, to send him to the state prison.

There are some kinds of men who cannot pass their time alone; they are the flails of occupied people.(Bonald, M.} There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

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.

A better principle than this, that "the majority shall rule," is this other, that justice shall rule. "Justice," says the code of Justinian, "is the constant and perpetual desire to render every man his due.

There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought.

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

It is invidious to distinguish particular men as adventurers: we are all such.

Dreamers are half-way men of thought, and men of thought are half-way men of action.

The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.

What a position of transcendent horror must that be, where the perpetrator of a great crime, till then a stranger to positive guilt, finds himself suddenly cut off, and forever, from all human sympathy, isolated from hope, the tenant of a solitary cell, and with a wide, impassable gulf yawning between him and that great brotherhood of which he has ceased to be a part--no longer regarded as a man, but as a monster in the shape of one, from whom Mercy herself turns away, and for whom Pity even has no tears!

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.