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Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Regard
Appreciate
Memories
Literature
Rather
Persons
Contemporaries
Person
Posterity
Merit

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defence of it by its friends.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other
Charles Caleb Colton
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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Self-love, in a well-regulated breast, is as the steward of the household, superintending the expenditure, and seeing that benevolence herself should be prudential, in order to be permanent, by providing that the reservoir which feeds should also be fed.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To judge by the event is an error all commit: for in every instance courage, if crowned with success, is heroism if clouded by defeat, temerity. When Nelson fought his battle in the Sound, it was the result alone that decided whether he was to kiss a hand at court or a rod at a court-martial.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In science, reason is the guide in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When certain persons abuse us, let us ask ourselves what description of characters it is that they admire we shall often find this a very consolatory question.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Jealousy is sustained as often by pride as by affection.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built--time and space, life and death, matter and mind?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Charles Caleb Colton