Charles Caleb Colton - Lacon (1820)

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As in the game of billiards, the balls are constantly producing effects from mere chance, which the most skillful player could neither execute nor foresee, but which, when they do happen, serve mainly to teach him how much he has still to learn...

Charles Caleb Colton
Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

Charles Caleb Colton
Hypocrites act by virtue.... They frame many counterfeits of her, with which they make an ostentatious parade, in all public assemblies, and processions; but the original of what they counterfeit, and which may indeed be said to have fallen from heaven, they produce so seldom, that it is cankered by the rust of sloth, and useless from non-application.

Charles Caleb Colton
Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.

Charles Caleb Colton
It is with diseases of the mind as with those of the body:.we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
The science of mathematics performs more than it promises.

Charles Caleb Colton
If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

Charles Caleb Colton
Of two evils, it is perhaps less injurious to society, that good doctrine should be accompanied by a bad life, than that a good life should lend its support to a bad doctrine.

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

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

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

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
The learned have often amused themselves by publishing the follies of the dunces; but if the dunces would retaliate by publishing the blunders of the learned, they might for once put forth a volume that would not be dull, although it would be large.

Charles Caleb Colton
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
Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Charles Caleb Colton
The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.

Charles Caleb Colton
As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.

Charles Caleb Colton
Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Charles Caleb Colton
Cruel men are the greatest lovers of Mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in other, not in themselves.

Charles Caleb Colton
Five thousand years have added no improvement to the hive of the bee, nor to the house of the beaver; but look at the habitations and the achievements of men!

Charles Caleb Colton
Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.

Charles Caleb Colton
A thorough-paced antiquary not only remembers what all other people have thought proper to forget, but he also forgets what all other people think is proper to remember.

Charles Caleb Colton
He that, standing on the shore, foretells, with truth, many of the undiscovered treasures of the ocean of science, even before the vessel that is to navigate it, can be fully equipped for the voyage, gives us a convincing proof of exalted wisdom, and of profound penetration.

Charles Caleb Colton
Self-love, in a well-regulated breast, is as the steward of the household, superintending the expenditure, and seeing that benevolence herself should be prudential, in order to be permanent, by providing that the reservoir which feeds should also be fed.

Charles Caleb Colton
The code of poor laws has at length grown up into a tree, which, like the fabulous Upas, overshadows and poisons the land; unwholesome expedients were the bud, dilemmas and depravities have been the blossom, and danger and despair are the bitter fruit.

Charles Caleb Colton
Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.

Charles Caleb Colton
He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more often he contemplates them, the former will grow greater, and the latter less.

Charles Caleb Colton
The integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.

Charles Caleb Colton