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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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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Prudence
Rules
Pride
Wrong
Common
Sense
Prides
Without
Pedantry
Right
Contented

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Flattery is often a traffic of mutual meanness, where although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived.
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It is with honesty in one particular as with wealth,--those that have the thing care less about the credit of it than those who have it not. No poor man can well afford to be thought so, and the less of honesty a finished rogue possesses the less he can afford to be supposed to want it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.
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The inheritance of a distinguished and noble name is a proud inheritance to him who lives worthily of it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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No propagation or multiplication is more rapid that that of evil, unless it be checked no growth more certain.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The firmest of friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water.
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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It is curious that we pay statesmen for what they say, not for what they do and judge of them from what they do, not from what they say. Hence they have one code of maxims for profession and another for practice, and make up their consciences as the Neapolitans do their beds, with one set of furniture for show and another for use.
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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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Alas! how has the social spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves and bigots at another by the self-tormentors of the cell, and the all-tormentors of the conclave!
Charles Caleb Colton
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The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.
Charles Caleb Colton