Inspirational Quotations by Charles Caleb Colton
- He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be,
and he who studies men will know how they are.
- True friendship is like sound health;
the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
- Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass
before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.
- 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.
- There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: He that thinks himself the happiest man really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
- Men spend their lives in anticipation, in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other -- it is our own ... We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.
- 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.
- Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
- 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.
- Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.
- No two things differ more than hurry and dispatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, dispatch of a strong one. A weak man in office, like a squirrel in a cage, is laboring eternally, but to no purpose, and is in constant motion without getting on a job; like a turnstile, he is in everybody's way, but stops nobody; he talks a great deal, but says very little; looks into everything but sees nothing; and has a hundred irons in the fire, but very few of them are hot, and with those few that are, he only burns his fingers.
- Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
- Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.
- All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, but by rising above them.