A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904) was an American writer best known for compiling and publishing aphorisms and moral reflections in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The sentiment here fits the didactic, etiquette-adjacent tone of his collections, which often contrast genuine feeling with showy display. In an era when letter-writing manuals and “fine” epistolary style were popular, Bovee’s remark reads as a corrective: he cautions against turning intimate correspondence into a performance of learning or wit. The line is typically encountered as a standalone maxim in quotation anthologies rather than as a widely cited passage from a famous essay or speech.

Bovee argues that love letters should communicate emotion plainly rather than parade cleverness. “Fancies and quotations” represent borrowed language—ornament, literary allusion, and rhetorical flourish—that can dilute sincerity by shifting attention from the lover’s feeling to the writer’s style. His metaphor of “by-ways” and “cull[ing] flowers of rhetoric” suggests that decorative language is a detour: it may be pretty, but it is not the shortest path to the heart of what one means. The maxim implies an ethic of authenticity: in intimate speech, directness is not a lack of artistry but the truest form of it.