Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
-
Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause, without obtaining it, than obtain, without deserving it; if it follow them, it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it. With inferior minds the reverse is observable.
-
The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
-
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
-
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.
-
There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by 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.
-
None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.
-
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.
-
Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
-
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.
-
I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
-
We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.
-
Many a man may thank his talent for his rank, but no man has ever been able to return the compliment by thanking his rank for his talent.
-
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.
-
With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.
-
Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.
-
The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.
-
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.
-
Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.
-
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.
-
Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
-
Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.
-
The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
-
To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.