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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.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Men
Limits
Wise
Intoxicate
Literature
Unlimited
Power
Trusted
Best
Heads
Enough
Strongest
Heart
Hearts
Good
Wine

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is best, if possible, to deceive no one for he that ... begins by deceiving others, will end ... by deceiving himself.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another's weakness, thousands have been destroyed by a false appreciation of their own strength.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is a common observation that any fool can get money but they are not wise that think so.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.
Charles Caleb Colton
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By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A wise man may be duped as well as a fool but the fool publishes the triumph of his deceiver the wise man is silent, and denies that triumph to an enemy which he would hardly concede to a friend a triumph that proclaims his own defeat.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than to persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.
Charles Caleb Colton
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None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Villainy that is vigilant will be an overmatch for virtue, if she slumber at her post.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Antithesis may be the blossom of wit, but it will never arrive at maturity unless sound sense be the trunk and truth the root.
Charles Caleb Colton
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That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.
Charles Caleb Colton