Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.
CHARLES CALEB COLTONAn honest man will continue to be so though surrounded on all sides by rogues.
More Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
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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 -
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 -
The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.
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Men of great and shining qualities do not always succeed in life, but the fault lies more often in themselves than in others.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Some persons will tell you, with an air of the miraculous, that they recovered although they were given over; whereas they might with more reason have said, they recovered because they were given over.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
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.
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He that can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity, or disgrace himself by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Hope is a prodigal young heir, and experience is his banker.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Mystery magnifies danger as the fog the sun.
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Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
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 -
To cure us of our immoderate love of gain, we should seriously consider how many goods there are that money will not purchase, and these the best; and how many evils there are that money will not remedy, and these the worst.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
That is fine benevolence, finely executed, which, like the Nile, comes from hidden sources.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
A coxcomb begins by determining that his own profession is the first; and he finishes by deciding that he is the first of profession.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Fortune, like other females, prefers a lover to a master, and submits with impatience to control; but he that wooes her with opportunity and importunity will seldom court her in vain.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
For one man who sincerely pities our misfortunes, there are a thousand who sincerely hate our success.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON