Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The true measure of your character is what you do when nobody’s watching.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

2. “The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

3. “The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

4. “Friendship often ends in love. But love in friendship; never.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

5. “Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

6. “Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

7. “The present time has one advantage over every other – it is our own.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

8. “When you have nothing to say, say nothing.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

9. “Money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed. Health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

10. “Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

11. “Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

12. “A hug is worth a thousand words.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

13. “Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

14. “Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

15. “Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

16. “There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

17. “Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

18. “Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

19. “Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

20. “The road to glory would cease to be arduous if it were trite and trodden; and great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities but to make them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

21. “We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

22. “Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

23. “The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

24. “Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

25. “If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

26. “Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

27. “The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

28. “The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

29. “The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

30. “Riches may enable us to confer favors, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

31. “Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

32. “What would you do if you knew for sure that no one would ever find out?”

— Charles Caleb Colton

33. “Mystery is not profoundness.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

34. “Our wealth is often a snare to ourselves, and always a temptation to others.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

35. “Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, dispatch of a strong one.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

Featured in: Strong Quotes

36. “Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

37. “All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, “equal to their business, but not above it;” a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

38. “Early rising not only gives us more life in the same number of years, but adds, likewise, to their number; and not only enables us to enjoy more of existence in the same time, but increases also the measure.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

39. “True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

40. “Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

41. “It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

42. “To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

43. “Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

44. “The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

45. “There is this difference between the two temporal blessings – health and money; money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied; and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflec.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

46. “Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another’s prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

47. “Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

48. “A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

49. “The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

50. “From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil.”

— Charles Caleb Colton