Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules; while common sense is contented to be right without them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

252. “Most men know what they hate, few what they love.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

253. “Love is an alliance of friendship and animalism; if the former predominates it is passion exalted and refined; if the latter, gross and sensual.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

254. “It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

255. “We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

256. “In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

257. “Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

265. “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

266. “Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

271. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

281. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

286. “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

287. “Happiness is that single and glorious thing which is the very light and sun of the whole animated universe; and where she is not it were better that nothing should be.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

288. “Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

289. “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

290. “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

291. “When in reading we meet with any maxim that may be of use, we should take it for our own, and make an immediate application of it, as we would of the advice of a friend whom we have purposely consulted.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

292. “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

293. “Doubt is the vestibule of faith.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

294. “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

295. “Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

296. “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

297. “Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

298. “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

299. “He that will only believe what he can fully comprehend must either have a very long head, or a very short creed.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

300. “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