Frank Moore Colby Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

Frank Moore Colby
Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humour?

Frank Moore Colby
Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

Frank Moore Colby
Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Frank Moore Colby
That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Frank Moore Colby
Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.

Frank Moore Colby
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

Frank Moore Colby
Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive.

Frank Moore Colby
Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Frank Moore Colby
As crowds increase we build our forts of inattention, and the more we talk the easier it is to mean little and listen not at all.

Frank Moore Colby
Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.

Frank Moore Colby
Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.

Frank Moore Colby
The world is a play that would not be worth seeing if we knew the plot.

Frank Moore Colby
We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

Frank Moore Colby
Distaste sounds more emphatic when expressed as moral disapproval. With most of us the moral counterblast is nothing more than the angry rendering of a yawn.

Frank Moore Colby
Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Frank Moore Colby
We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.

Frank Moore Colby
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

Frank Moore Colby
As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.

Frank Moore Colby
If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

Frank Moore Colby
Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?

Frank Moore Colby
Women singly do a good deal of harm. Women in bulk are chastening.

Frank Moore Colby
In middle life politics are not a mental acquisition; they are a temperament.

Frank Moore Colby
There ought to be some sign in a book about man, that the writer knows thoroughly one man at least.

Frank Moore Colby