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We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
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Charles Colton
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Atheism
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More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.
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Villains are usually the worst casuists, and rush into crimes to avoid less. Henry VIII. committed murder to avoid the imputation of adultery and in our times, those who commit the latter crime attempt to wash off the stain of seducing the wife by signifying their readiness to shoot the husband.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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
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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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Our wealth is often a snare to ourselves, and always a temptation to others.
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 are two metals, one of which is omnipotent in the cabinet, and the other in the camp--gold and iron. He that knows how to apply them both may indeed attain the highest station.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Patience is the support of weakness impatience the ruin of strength.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are male as well as female gossips.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are sermons in stones, in healthy books, and good in everything.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
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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Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is always easy to shut a book, but not quite so easy to get rid of a lettered coxcomb.
Charles Caleb Colton