Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

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Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice; by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant; by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.

Charles Caleb Colton
Oppression cannot prosper where none will submit to be enslaved.

Charles Caleb Colton
By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.

Charles Caleb Colton
Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation.

Charles Caleb Colton
Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Charles Caleb Colton
When all moves equally (says Pascal), nothing seems to move as in a vessel under sail; and when all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so. He that stops first, views as from a fixed point the horrible extravagance that transports the rest.

Charles Caleb Colton
Sincerely to aspire after virtue, is to gain her; and zealously to labour after her wages, is to receive them.

Charles Caleb Colton
Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.

Charles Caleb Colton
It is true that each disorder has a thousand prescriptions, but not a single remedy.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

Charles Caleb Colton
Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

Charles Caleb Colton
Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force.

Charles Caleb Colton
In its primary signification, all vice, that is, all excess, brings on its own punishment, even here. By certain fixed, settled and established laws of Him who is the God of nature, excess of every kind destroys that constitution which temperance would preserve. The debauchee offers up his body a "living sacrifice to sin.

Charles Caleb Colton
Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.

Charles Caleb Colton
The mob is a monster, with the hands of Briareus, but the head of Polyphemus,--strong to execute, but blind to perceive.

Charles Caleb Colton
Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.

Charles Caleb Colton
If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists--and I am inclined to think it is so--it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool.

Charles Caleb Colton
A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.

Charles Caleb Colton
Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.

Charles Caleb Colton
Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

Charles Caleb Colton
I question if Epicurus and Hume have done mankind a greater service by the looseness of their doctrines than by the purity of their lives. Of such men we may more justly exclaim, than of Caesar, "Confound their virtues, they've undone the world!

Charles Caleb Colton
"Lawyers Are": The only civil delinquents whose judges must of necessity be chosen from (amongst) themselves.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.

Charles Caleb Colton
A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

Charles Caleb Colton
The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Charles Caleb Colton
It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

Charles Caleb Colton
No men despise physic so much as physicians, because no men so thoroughly understand how little it can perform.

Charles Caleb Colton
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