Quotes By Charles Caleb Colton

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

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.

Mystery is not profoundness.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

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

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.

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

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.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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