Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

303. “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

304. “He that has cut the claws of the lion will not feel quite secure until he has also drawn his teeth.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defence of it by its friends.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

Featured in: Strong Quotes

312. “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

313. “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

314. “He that swells in prosperity will be sure to shrink in adversity.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

315. “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

316. “Genius, in one respect, is like gold; numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “Pity a thing often avowed, seldom felt; hatred is a thing often felt, seldom avowed.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

321. “He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

322. “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

323. “In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

324. “Knavery is supple, and can bend, but honesty is firm and upright and yields not.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

325. “Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

326. “Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

327. “By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind; but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

331. “In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another; is there any harm in letting it alone?”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

333. “A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

334. “The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

335. “Let us not be too prodigal when we are young, nor too parsimonious when we are old. Otherwise we shall fall into the common error of those, who, when they had the power to enjoy, had not the prudence to acquire; and when they had the prudence to acquire, had no longer the power to enjoy.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

336. “Doubt is the vestibule of faith.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

337. “Oppression cannot prosper where none will submit to be enslaved.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

338. “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

339. “There are too many who reverse both the principles and the practice of the Apostles; they become all things to all men, not to serve others, but themselves; and they try all things only to hold fast that which is bad.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

340. “Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

341. “Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

342. “It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

343. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

344. “Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

345. “As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

346. “Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

347. “Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another’s weakness, thousands have been destroyed by a false appreciation of their own strength.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

348. “Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

349. “Neutrality is no favorite with Providence, for we are so formed that it is scarcely possible for us to stand neuter in our hearts, although we may deem it prudent to appear so in our actions.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

350. “Most females will forgive a liberty rather than a slight.”

— Charles Caleb Colton