Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
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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.
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The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
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If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
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Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.
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None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.
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There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.
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I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
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There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
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With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.
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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.
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We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.
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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.
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Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.
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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.
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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.
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Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.
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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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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.
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True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
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Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.