Charles Caleb Colton - Lacon (1820)

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

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

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

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
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
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
The science of mathematics performs more than it promises.

Charles Caleb Colton