Quotes By Charles Caleb Colton

The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.

Mystery is not profoundness.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.

We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.

Our incomes should be like our shoes; if too small, they will gall and pinch us; but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

The firmest of friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.

Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.