Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

517 Sourced Quotes

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
That alliance may be said to have a double tie, where the minds are united as well as the body; and the union will have all its strength when both the links are in perfection together.

Charles Caleb Colton
Men of great and shining qualities do not always succeed in life, but the fault lies more often in themselves than in others.

Charles Caleb Colton
Strong as our passions are, they may be starved into submission, and conquered without being killed.

Charles Caleb Colton
There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.

Charles Caleb Colton
The man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
Afflictions sent by providence melt the constancy of the noble minded, but confirm the obduracy of the vile, as the same furnace that liquefies the gold, hardens the clay Charles Caleb Colton.

Charles Caleb Colton
For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her.

Charles Caleb Colton
A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

Charles Caleb Colton
Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.

Charles Caleb Colton
It was observed of Elizabeth that she was weak herself, but chose wise counsellors; to which it was replied, that to choose wise counsellors was, in a prince, the highest wisdom.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
No man can promise himself even fifty years of life, but any man may, if he please, live in the proportion of fifty years in forty-let him rise early, that he may have the day before him, and let him make the most of the day, by determining to expend it on two sorts of acquaintance only-those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something maybe learned.

Charles Caleb Colton
It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest... he should be swallowed up.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
It is more easy to forgive the weak who have injured us than the powerful whom we have injured.

Charles Caleb Colton
All who have been great and good without Christianity would have been much greater and better with it. If there be, amongst the sons of men, a single exception to this maxim, the divine Socrates may be allowed to put in the strongest claim. It was his high ambition to deserve, by deeds, not by creeds, an unrevealed heaven, and by works, not by faith, to enter an unpromised land.

Charles Caleb Colton