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Flattery is often a traffic of mutual meanness, where although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Party
Deceived
Often
Flattery
Deception
Traffic
Parties
Mutual
Although
Meanness
Neither
Intend

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Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules while common sense is contented to be right without them.
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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.
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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.
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Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions than by discovering those of our enemy.
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We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury, and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or flattery the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the third.
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There are two way of establishing a reputation, one to be praised by honest people and the other to be accused by rogues. It is best, however, to secure the first one, because it will always be accompanied by the latter.
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The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.
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The most zealous converters are always the most rancorous when they fail of producing conversion.
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Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.
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The upright, if he suffer calumny to move him, fears the tongue of man more than the eye of God.
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Some reputed saints that have been canonized ought to have been cannonaded.
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There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.
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The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy many a speech to a sentence and many a folio to a primer.
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Unity of opinion is indeed a glorious and desirable thing, and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth but if the centre be error, the greater the circumference, the greater the evil.
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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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He [the miser] falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities nor its pleasures for his trouble.
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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.
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Habit will reconcile us to everything but change
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It was served of the Jesuits, that they constantly inculcated a thorough contempt of worldly things in their doctrines, but eagerly grasped at them in their lives. They were wise in their generation for they cried down worldly things because they wanted to obtain them, and cried up spiritual things, because they wanted to dispose of them.
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Men of great and shining qualities do not always succeed in life, but the fault lies more often in themselves than in others.
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