Top 500 Charles Caleb Colton Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “It is good to act as if. It is even better to grow to the point where it is no longer an act.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

405. “Shining outward qualities, although they may excite first-rate expectations, are not unusually found to be the companions of second-rate abilities.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

406. “There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

408. “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

409. “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

410. “Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

411. “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

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

413. “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

414. “The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind; but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

415. “A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

416. “The further we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

418. “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

419. “Philosophy is a bully that talks loud when the danger is at a distant; but, the moment she is pressed hard by an enemy, she is nowhere to be found and leaves the brunt of the battle to be fought by her steady, humble comrade, religion.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

420. “Theory is worth but little, unless it can explain its own phenomena, and it must effect this without contradicting itself; therefore, the facts are sometimes assimilated to the theory, rather than the theory to the facts.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

421. “The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

422. “Pride requires very costly food-its keeper’s happiness.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

423. “It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

424. “Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

425. “Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

426. “We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

427. “You cannot separate charity and religion.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

428. “No propagation or multiplication is more rapid that that of evil, unless it be checked; no growth more certain.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

429. “Some indeed there are who profess to despise all flattery, but even these are nevertheless to be flattered, by being told that they do despise it.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

430. “Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

431. “Sir Richard Steele has observed, that there is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

432. “We shall at all times chance upon men of recondite acquirements, but whose qualifications, from the incommunicative and inactive habits of their owners, are as utterly useless to others as though the possessors had them not.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

433. “My lowest days as a Christian have been more fulfilling and rewarding than all the days of glory in the White House.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

434. “If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

435. “The reason why great men meet with so little pity or attachment in adversity, would seem to be this: the friends of a great man were made by his fortune, his enemies by himself, and revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

436. “Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

437. “That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

438. “It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

439. “It is more easy to forgive the weak who have injured us than the powerful whom we have injured.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

440. “If all seconds were as averse to duels as their principals, very little blood would be shed in that way.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

441. “To be satisfied with the acquittal of the world, though accompanied with the secret condemnation of conscience, this is the mark of a little mind; but it requires a soul of no common stamp to be satisfied with its own acquittal, and to despise the condemnation of the world.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

442. “A wise man may be duped as well as a fool; but the fool publishes the triumph of the deceiver.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

443. “To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

444. “Dreams ought to produce no conviction whatever on philosophical minds. If we consider how many dreams are dreamt every night, and how many events occur every day, we shall no longer wonder at those accidental coincidences which ignorance mistakes for verifications.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

445. “The French have a saying that whatever excellence a man may exhibit in a public station he is very apt to be ridiculous in a private one.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

446. “The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

447. “When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

448. “Many books owe their success to the good memories of their authors and the bad memories of their readers.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

449. “It is a common observation that any fool can get money; but they are not wise that think so.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

450. “There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed; but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals.”

— Charles Caleb Colton