Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.
Those that will not permit their wealth to do any good for others. . . cut themselves off from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness later.
He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others, perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness.
"Lawyers Are": The only civil delinquents whose judges must of necessity be chosen from (amongst) themselves.
An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay and present praise.
Most importantly: Don't adjust your results to build up the ego of the chief strategist. Especially if the strategist is you.
The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.
This world cannot explain its own difficulties without the assistance of another.
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.
Wealth is a relative thing since those who have little and want less are richer than those who have much but want more.
The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.
For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.
Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.
We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.
How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.
We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their sterling and intrinsic merit.
With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose; for good books are as scarce as good companions...
Those graces which from their presumed facility encourage all to attempt an imitation of them, are usually the most inimitable.
Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
There are two metals, one of which is omnipotent in the cabinet, and the other in the camp--gold and iron. He that knows how to apply them both may indeed attain the highest station.
The road to glory would cease to be arduous if it were trite and trodden; and great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities but to make them.
Error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth than ignorance.
The hate which we all bear with the most Christian patience is the hate of those who envy us.
It has been well observed that we should treat futurity as an aged friend from whom we expect a rich legacy.
The only kind office performed for us by our friends of which we never complain is our funeral; and the only thing which we most want, happens to be the only thing we never purchase--our coffin.
A wise minister would rather preserve peace than gain a victory, because he knows that even the most successful war leaves nations generally more poor, always more profligate, than it found them.
So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.
Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.
The wealth is ultimately just a relative thing. As a person with little money and little more needs to rich guys money but really wishes
Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.
The inheritance of a distinguished and noble name is a proud inheritance to him who lives worthily of it.
There are many that despise half the world; but if there be any that despise the whole of it, it is because the other half despises them.
He that can please nobody is not so much to be pitied as he that nobody can please.
Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.
Shining outward qualities, although they may excite first-rate expectations, are not unusually found to be the companions of second-rate abilities.
Charles Fox said that restorations were the most bloody of all revolutions; and he might have added that reformations are the best mode of preventing the necessity of either.
Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.
