Life & Wisdom Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

Good judgment, Bovee suggests, isn’t a pristine record; it’s an editing process. The line takes a jab at the Victorian fantasy of the flawless moral actor and replaces it with something more pragmatic: discretion as a kind of mental bookkeeping. Everyone errs. The real tell is whether you learn fast enough to stop paying the same tuition twice.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Sound discretion” sounds like a staid virtue, the sort you’d find carved into a courthouse wall. Then Bovee undercuts its austerity with a demotion: it’s “not so much indicated” by perfection. That little hedge matters. He isn’t excusing carelessness; he’s redefining competence as responsiveness. The second half snaps shut with “never repeating it,” turning wisdom into behavior, not posture. You don’t get credit for feeling sorry, issuing eloquent explanations, or cultivating a self-image as “careful.” You get credit for different choices next time.

There’s also an implied critique of pride. Repeating a mistake often isn’t ignorance; it’s ego, habit, or a refusal to admit the first error was an error. In the 19th-century moral literature Bovee inhabited, “character” was a public asset. This sentence recasts character as less about appearing right and more about being corrigible. It’s an ethic suited to an America learning, failing, and iterating in real time: industry, politics, personal conduct. The subtext is bracingly modern: progress is measured not by the absence of failure, but by the speed of feedback.