Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

102. “Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

103. “Our minds are as different as our faces. We are all traveling to one destination: happiness, but few are going by the same road.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

104. “Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

105. “The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

106. “There is this paradox in pride – it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

107. “Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

108. “Courage is like the diamond, – very brilliant; not changed by fire, capable of high polish, but except for the purpose of cutting hard bodies useless.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

109. “He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

110. “A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

111. “Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

112. “Death is like thunder in two particulars; we are alarmed, at the sound of it; and it is formidable only from that which preceded it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

113. “All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, by by rising above them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

114. “If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth; but, if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. We shall find that it is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas, than one hole in our coat.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

115. “I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

116. “Peace is the evening star of the soul, as virtue is its sun, and the two are never far apart.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

117. “In most quarrels there is a fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint, as well as steel. Either of them may hammer on wood forever; no fire will follow.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

118. “We ask advice but we mean approbation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

119. “Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

120. “To judge by the event is an error all commit: for in every instance courage, if crowned with success, is heroism; if clouded by defeat, temerity. When Nelson fought his battle in the Sound, it was the result alone that decided whether he was to kiss a hand at court or a rod at a court-martial.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

121. “None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

122. “Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

123. “It is the briefest yet wisest maxim which tells us to meddle not.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

124. “It is a mistake, that a lust for power is the mark of a great mind; for even the weakest have been captivated by it; and for minds of the highest order, it has no charms.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

125. “Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

126. “A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

127. “The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

128. “He who knows himself knows others.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

129. “Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

130. “There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

131. “Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

132. “Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

133. “No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

134. “For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

135. “We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

136. “Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

137. “The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

138. “Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

139. “None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

140. “Custom is the law of one description of fools, and fashion of another; but the two parties often clash – for precedent is the legislator of the first, and novelty of the last. Custom, therefore, looks to things that are past, and fashion to things that are present.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

141. “Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

142. “Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

143. “Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us – never cease to instruct – never cloy.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

144. “Unlike the sun, intellectual luminaries shine brightest after they set.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

145. “We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

146. “He that has never suffered extreme adversity knows not the full extent of his own depravation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

147. “The sun should not set upon our anger, neither should he rise upon our confidence. We should forgive freely, but forget rarely. I will not be revenged, and this I owe to my enemy; but I will remember, and this I owe to myself.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

148. “That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

149. “Silence is less injurious than a weak reply.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

150. “Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.”

— Charles Caleb Colton