Charles Caleb Colton quotes - page 6

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints. (Charles Caleb Colton)
Pain may be said to follow pleasure, as its shadow but the misfortune is, that the substance belongs to the shadow, and the emptiness to its cause.
Charles Caleb Colton
Death is like thunder in two particulars, we are alarmed at the sound of it, and it is formidable only from that which has prceded it.
Charles Caleb Colton
Revenge - A debt in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual.
Charles Caleb Colton
Early rising not only gives us more life in the same number of years, but adds, likewise, to their number and not only enables us to enjoy more of existence in the same time, but increases also the measure.
Charles Caleb Colton
It is far more easy to acquire fortune like a knave than to expend it like a gentleman.
Charles Caleb Colton
Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.
Charles Caleb Colton
To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
Charles Caleb Colton
The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world.
Charles Caleb Colton
Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.
Charles Caleb Colton
Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, And she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an. (Charles Caleb Colton)
No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought.
Charles Caleb Colton
The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.
Charles Caleb Colton
The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.
Charles Caleb Colton
Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave.
Charles Caleb Colton
Falsehood is never so successful as when she baits her hook with truth, and no opinions so fastly misled us as those that are not wholly wrong, as no timepieces so effectually deceive the wearer as those that are sometimes right.
Charles Caleb Colton
Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power But if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.
Charles Caleb Colton
Our very best friends have a tincture of jealousy even in their friendship and when they hear us praised by others will ascribe it to sinister and interested motives if they can.
Charles Caleb Colton
Tomorrow It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fools calendar.
Charles Caleb Colton
Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity 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
In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong, in the midst of right, As mariners die of thirst in the midst of water. (Charles Caleb Colton)
In most quarrels there is a fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint, as well as steel. Either of them, may hammer on wood forever no fire will follow.
Charles Caleb Colton
Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers on their road.- Both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.
Charles Caleb Colton
Subtract from the great man all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen to be a pygmy.
Charles Caleb Colton
We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.
Charles Caleb Colton