Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

353. “Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates and destroys.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

354. “When a man has displayed talent in some particular path, and left all competitors behind him in it, the world are too apt to give him credit for universality of genius, and to anticipate for him success in all that he undertakes.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

355. “It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds and inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed nor calls out his powers if pastured out with the common herd, that are destined for the collar and the yoke.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

356. “Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer; for it prevents those disorders which other remedies sometimes cure, but sometimes confirm.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

357. “Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

358. “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

359. “That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

360. “The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

361. “Make no enemies; he is insignificant indeed that can do thee no harm.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

362. “Professors in every branch of the sciences, prefer their own theories to truth: the reason is that their theories are private property, but truth is common stock.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

363. “Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than to persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

364. “Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service, and pays the bitterest wages. Its service is to watch the success of one’s enemy; its wages to be sure of it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

365. “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

366. “We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?”

— Charles Caleb Colton

367. “The praise of the envious is far less creditable than their censure; they praise only that which they can surpass, but that which surpasses them they censure.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

368. “There are many that despise half the world; but if there be any that despise the whole of it, it is because the other half despises them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

369. “Style is indeed the valet of genius, and an able one too; but as the true gentleman will appear, even in rags, so true genius will shine, even through the coarsest style.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

370. “Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

371. “Men’s arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

372. “Sensibility would be a good portress if she had but one hand; with her right she opens the door to pleasure, but with her left to pain.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

373. “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

374. “A beautiful woman, if poor, should use double circumspection; for her beauty will tempt others, her poverty herself.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

375. “It is far better to borrow experience than to buy it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

376. “God will excuse our prayers for ourselves whenever we are prevented from them by being occupied in such good works as to entitle us to the prayers of others.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

377. “If the prodigal quits life in debt to others, the miser quits it still deeper in debt to himself.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

378. “Calumny crosses oceans, scales mountains and traverses deserts, with greater ease than the Scythian Abaris, and like him, rides upon a poisoned arrow.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

379. “The hate which we all bear with the most Christian patience is the hate of those who envy us.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

380. “When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things; first, that such persons do not understand themselves; and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

381. “Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

382. “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

383. “That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he has published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

384. “Secrecy is the soul of all great designs.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

385. “The most consistent men are not more unlike to others, than they are at times to themselves.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

386. “As there are none so weak that we may venture to injure them with impunity, so there are none so low that they may not at some time be able to repay an obligation. Therefore, what benevolence would dictate, prudence would confirm.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

387. “The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

388. “He that can please nobody is not so much to be pitied as he that nobody can please.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

389. “Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

390. “It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

391. “Much too oft we make life gloomy – When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

392. “The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

393. “Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

394. “There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

395. “No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

396. “Antithesis may be the blossom of wit, but it will never arrive at maturity unless sound sense be the trunk and truth the root.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

398. “The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

399. “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

400. “Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.”

— Charles Caleb Colton