Charles Caleb Colton - Men Quotes

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He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

Charles Caleb Colton
From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil.

Charles Caleb Colton
We should have all our communications with men, as in the presence of God; and with God, as in the presence of men.

Charles Caleb Colton
The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
Religion, like its votaries, while it exists on earth, must have a body as well as a soul. A religion purely spiritual might suit a being as pure, but men are compound animals; and the body too often lords it over the mind.

Charles Caleb Colton
Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

Charles Caleb Colton
There are truths which some men despise because they have not examined, and which they will not examine because they despise.

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
Shrewd and crafty politicians, when they wish to bring about an unpopular measure, must not go straight forward to work, if they do they will certainly fail; and failures to men in power, are like defeats to a general, they shake their popularity. Therefore, since they cannot sail in the teeth of the wind, they must tack, and ultimately gain their object, by appearing at times to be departing from it.

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 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
Men spend their lives in anticipations,—in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.

Charles Caleb Colton
The most consistent men are not more unlike to others, than they are at times to themselves.

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
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
Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose--"a power to accomplish all that we undertake;" for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry, Pope in painting, Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men.

Charles Caleb Colton
In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton
Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

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
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
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
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
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
Those illustrious men, who, like torches, have consumed themselves, in order to enlighten others, have often lived unrewarded, and died unlamented. But the tongues of aftertimes have done them justice in one sense, but injustice in another. They have honoured them with their praise, but they have disgraced them with their pity. They pity them forsooth, because they missed of present praise, and temporal emolument; things great indeed to the little, but little to the great.

Charles Caleb Colton