Quote

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

Charles Caleb Colton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Power
Begins
Mean
Ambition
Wealth
Finishes
Mistake
Accumulating
Happiness
Accumulate
Means
Avarice
Makes
Concerning
Ends
Continuing

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

Image
It is best, if possible, to deceive no one for he that ... begins by deceiving others, will end ... by deceiving himself.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
In its primary signification, all vice, that is, all excess, brings on its own punishment, even here. By certain fixed, settled and established laws of Him who is the God of nature, excess of every kind destroys that constitution which temperance would preserve. The debauchee offers up his body a living sacrifice to sin.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Accustom yourself to submit on all and every occasion, and on the most minute, no less than on the most important circumstances of life, to a small present evil, to obtain a greater distant good. This will give decision, tone, and energy to the mind, which, thus disciplined, will often reap victory from defeat and honor from repulse.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
We hate some persons because we do not know them and will not know them because we hate them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
True friendship is like sound health the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
In pulpit eloquence, the grand difficulty lies here--to give the subject all the dignity it so fully deserves, without attaching any importance to ourselves. The Christian messenger cannot think too highly of his prince, nor too humbly of himself.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
For one man who sincerely pities our misfortunes, there are a thousand who sincerely hate our success.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
None of us are so much praised or censured as we think.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.
Charles Caleb Colton