Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

152. “A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

153. “Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide; anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

154. “Fortune has been considered the guardian divinity of fools; and, on this score, she has been accused of blindness; but it should rather be adduced as a proof of her sagacity, when she helps those who cannot help themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

155. “We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

156. “As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

157. “Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve; we may give somewhat of novelty to that which was old, condensation to that which was diffuse, perspicuity to that which was obscure, and currency to that which was recondite.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

158. “Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

159. “Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

160. “Villains are usually the worst casuists, and rush into crimes to avoid less. Henry VIII. committed murder to avoid the imputation of adultery; and in our times, those who commit the latter crime attempt to wash off the stain of seducing the wife by signifying their readiness to shoot the husband.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

161. “A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

162. “Life isn’t like a book. Life isn’t logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

163. “Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

164. “Of all the marvelous works of God, perhaps the one angels view with the most supreme astonishment, is a proud man.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

165. “They that are loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. It is probable that he who is killed by lightning hears no noise; but the thunder-clap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

166. “Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

167. “Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

168. “We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

169. “The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

170. “Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

171. “A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

172. “Cruel men are the greatest lovers of Mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in other, not in themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

173. “Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

174. “Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

175. “Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship; and when they hear us praised by others, will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

176. “As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

177. “As we ascend in society, like those who climb a mountain, we shall find that the line of perpetual congelation commences with the higher circles; and the nearer we approach to the grand luminary the court, the more frigidity and apathy shall we experience.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

178. “When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

179. “Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

180. “We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

181. “A Christian builds his fortitude on a better foundation than stoicism; he is pleased with every thing that happens, because he knows it could not happen unless it first pleased God, and that which pleases Him must be best.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

182. “Few things are more agreeable to self-love than revenge, and yet no cause so effectually restrains us from revenge as self-love. And this paradox naturally suggests another; that the strength of the community is not unfrequently built upon the weakness of those individuals that compose it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

183. “Levity is often less foolish and gravity less wise than each of them appears.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

184. “Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

185. “It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

186. “Envy ought to have no place allowed it in the hearts of people; for the goods of this present world are so vile and low that they are beneath it; and those of the future world are so vast and exalted that they are above it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

187. “We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

188. “He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

189. “Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

190. “Afflictions sent by providence melt the constancy of the noble minded, but confirm the obduracy of the vile, as the same furnace that liquefies the gold, hardens the clay Charles Caleb Colton.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

191. “Love may exist without jealousy, although this is rare: but jealousy may exist without love, and this is common; for jealousy can feed on that which is bitter no less than on that which is sweet, and is sustained by pride as often as by affection.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

192. “Faith and works are necessary to our spiritual life as Christians, as soul and body are to our natural life as men; for faith is the soul of religion, and works the body.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

193. “There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

194. “Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

195. “We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

196. “Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good; if meagre, muddy, vapid and sour, both are fit only to engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous and sparkling, they communicate a genial glow to the spirits, improve the taste, and expand the heart.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

197. “We should have all our communications with men, as in the presence of God; and with God, as in the presence of men.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

198. “The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

199. “Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

200. “Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton