Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “To be continually subject to the breath of slander, will tarnish the purest virtue, as a constant exposure to the atmosphere will obscure the brightness of the finest gold; but in either case, the real value of both continues the same, although the currency may be somewhat impeded.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

252. “He that can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity, or disgrace himself by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

253. “To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

254. “Women who are the least bashful are not unfrequently the most modest; and we are never more deceived than when we would infer any laxity of principle from that freedom of demeanor which often arises from a total ignorance of vice.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

255. “Worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living somewhat within them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

256. “Some are cursed with the fullness of satiety; and how can they bear the ills of life when its very pleasures fatigue them?”

— Charles Caleb Colton

257. “If a horse has four legs, and I’m riding it, I think I can win.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

258. “Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

259. “Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

260. “It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

261. “Unity of opinion is indeed a glorious and desirable thing, and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth; but if the centre be error, the greater the circumference, the greater the evil.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

262. “Villainy that is vigilant will be an overmatch for virtue, if she slumber at her post.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

263. “For one man who sincerely pities our misfortunes, there are a thousand who sincerely hate our success.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

264. “Strong as our passions are, they may be starved into submission, and conquered without being killed.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

265. “That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful of it than those who have inherited one.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

266. “We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

267. “Public charities and benevolent associations for the gratuitous relief of every species of distress, are peculiar to Christianity; no other system of civil or religious policy has originated them; they form its highest praise and characteristic feature.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

268. “Any one can give advice, such as it is, but only a wise man knows how to profit by it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

269. “The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

270. “We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

271. “God is as great in minuteness as He is in magnitude.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

272. “To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

273. “Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions than by discovering those of our enemy.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

274. “There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

275. “Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

276. “The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

277. “Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

278. “The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

279. “Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

280. “There is this of good in real evils; they deliver us, while they last, from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

281. “The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every other loss, and by the act of suicide, renounces earth to forfeit Heaven.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

282. “He that abuses his own profession will not patiently bear with any one else who does so. And this is one of our most subtle operations of self-love. For when we abuse our own profession, we tacitly except ourselves; but when another abuses it, we are far from being certain that this is the case.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

283. “The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

284. “An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

285. “In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

286. “An Irish man fights before he reasons, a Scotchman reasons before he fights, an Englishman is not particular as to the order of precedence, but will do either to accommodate his customers.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

287. “Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

288. “The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

289. “Pride is less ashamed of being ignorant, than of being instructed, and she looks too high to find that, which very often lies beneath her.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

290. “Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

291. “The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

292. “Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

293. “The interests of society often render it expedient not to utter the whole truth, the interests of science never: for in this field we have much more to fear from the deficiency of truth than from its abundance.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

294. “Were we as eloquent as angels we still would please people much more by listening rather than talking.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

295. “It is much easier to ruin a man of principle than a man of none, for he may be ruined through his scruples. Knavery is supple and can bend; but honesty is firm and upright, and yields not.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

296. “When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement; for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

297. “When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

298. “Heaven may have happiness as utterly unknown to us as the gift of perfect vision would be to a man born blind. If we consider the inlets of pleasure from five senses only, we may be sure that the same Being who created us could have given us five hundred, if He had pleased.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

299. “Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were, by a coup de main,, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

300. “The man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are.”

— Charles Caleb Colton