Literature has now become a game in which the booksellers are the kings; the critics, the knaves; the public, the pack; and the poor author, the mere table or thing played upon.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Literature
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Poetry
Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Success, Character
Corporeal charms may indeed gain admirers, but there must be mental ones to retain them.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Love
Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Religion
Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service, and pays the bitterest wages. Its service is, to watch the success of our enemy; its wages to be sure of it.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Jealousy
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and, without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity. The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unite and preserves, while vice separates and destroys. The good may well be termed the salt of the earth, for where there is no integrity there can be no confidence; and where there is no confidence there can be no unanimity.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Vice
That alliance may be said to have a double tie, where the minds are united as well as the body, and the union will have all its strength, when both the links are in perfection together.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Marriage
Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Morals, Snow, Morality, Corruption, Defects
It has been well observed, that the tongue discovers the state of the mind no less than that of the body; but, in either case, before the philosopher or the physician can judge, the patient must open his mouth.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Talking
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding nobility of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Ancestry
Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; some to talk, and these are the great majority.—The first page of an author frequently suffices all the purposes of this latter class, of whom it has been said, they treat books, as some do lords, inform themselves of their titles, and then boast of an intimate acquaintance.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Reading
Some are cursed with the fulness of satiety; and how can they bear the ills of life, when its very pleasures fatigue them!
—Charles Caleb Colton
Deformity of heart I call the worst deformity of all; for what is form, or face, but the soul’s index, or its case?
—Charles Caleb Colton
We follow the world in approving others; we go far before it in approving ourselves.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Milton neither aspired to present fame, nor even expected it.—His high ambition was (to use his own words), “To leave something so written, to after ages, that they should not willingly let it die.”—And Cato finally observed, he would much rather posterity should ask why no statues were erected to him, than why they were.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Fame
Analogy, although it is not infallible, is yet that telescope of the mind by which it is marvelously assisted in the discovery of both physical and moral truth.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Reply with wit to gravity, and with gravity to wit.—Make a full concession to your adversary; give him every credit for the arguments you know you can answer, and slur over those you feel you cannot.—But above all, if lie have the privilege of making his reply, take especial care that the strongest thing you have to urge be the last.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Time Management, Time, Spending time wisely, Value of Time
That which we acquire with most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are commonly more careful of it than those by whom it may have been inherited.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Wealth
It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness, will be our credulity as to the mysterious powers assumed by others.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again—for, like true friends, they will never fail us—never cease to instruct—never cloy—Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Reading, Libraries, Books, Literature
Love is an alliance of friendship and animalism; if the former predominates it is passion exalted and refined; if the latter, gross and sensual.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Love
Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Honor is unstable, and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food. She builds a lofty structure on the sandy foundation of the esteem of those who are of all beings the most subject to change.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Honor
Slander cannot make the subject of it either better or worse.—It may represent us in a false light, or place a likeness of us in a bad one, but we are always the same.—Not so the slanderer, for calumny always makes the calumniator worse, but the calumniated never.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Slander
Two things, well considered, would prevent many quarrels; first to have it well ascertained whether we are not disputing about terms rather than things; and secondly, to examine whether that on which we differ is worth contending about.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Quarrels
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.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Topics: Solitude, Self-Discovery
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Richard Hooker English Theologian, Political Theorist
- Henri Nouwen Dutch Catholic Priest
- Thomas Aquinas Italian Catholic Priest
- Sam Shoemaker American Episcopal Priest
- Jerome Greek Priest
- Desmond Tutu South African Clergyman
- Benjamin Whichcote British Anglican Priest
- John Vianney French Catholic Priest
- E. Stanley Jones American Methodist Priest
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
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