We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.
CHARLES CALEB COLTONAs no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.
More Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
The poorest man would not part with health for money, but the richest would gladly part with all their money for health.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
A man’s profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful of it than those who have inherited one.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Total freedom from error is what none of us will allow to our neighbors; however we may be inclined to flirt a little with such spotless perfection ourselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON -
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.
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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 -
Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON






