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Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Talent
Particular
Either
Nothing
Life
Like
Grand
Effects
Genius

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.
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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Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules while common sense is contented to be right without them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If kings would only determine not to extend their dominions until they had filled them with happiness, they would find the smallest territories too large, but the longest life too short for the full accomplishment of so grand and so noble an ambition.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life but the same can be said of the most weak.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Many a man may thank his talent for his rank, but no man has ever been able to return the compliment by thanking his rank for his talent.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness but we ought rather to suspect our own.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are two things which ought to teach us to think but meanly of human glory the very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Afflictions sent by providence melt the constancy of the noble minded, but confirm the obduracy of the vile, as the same furnace that liquefies the gold, hardens the clay Charles Caleb Colton.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.
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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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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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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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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Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.
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