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There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Nothing
Imprudent
Excessive
Prudence
Literature

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done and when they disapprove you, what good.
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A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.
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We submit to the society of those that can inform us, but we seek the society of those whom we can inform. And men of genius ought not to be chagrined if they see themselves neglected. For when we communicate knowledge, we are raised in our own estimation but when we receive it, we are lowered.
Charles Caleb Colton
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True friendship is like sound health the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
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Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most men know what they hate, few what they love.
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Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.
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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Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non animum mutant': they see new meridians, but the same men, and with heads as empty as their pockets.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When the air balloon was first discovered, some one flippantly asked Dr. Franklin what was the use of it. The doctor answered this question by asking another: What is the use of a new-born infant? It may become a man.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A leveller has long ago been set down as a ridiculous and chimerical being, who, if he could finish his work to-day, would have to begin it again tomorrow.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Professors in every branch of the sciences, prefer their own theories to truth: the reason is that their theories are private property, but truth is common stock.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow.
Charles Caleb Colton