If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defence of it by its friends.
CHARLES CALEB COLTONCommerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
More Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
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It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.
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Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.
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Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.
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It is with nations as with individuals, those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves; for the whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.
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We are more inclined to hate one another for points on which we differ, than to love one another for points on which we agree.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
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No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.
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Pride is less ashamed of being ignorant, than of being instructed, and she looks too high to find that, which very often lies beneath her.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.
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Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.
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The true measure of your character is what you do when nobody’s watching.
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It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON