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When you have nothing to say, say nothing a weak defense strengthens your opponent, and silence is less injurious than a bad reply.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Weak
Silence
Less
Injurious
Nothing
Strengthens
Reply
Opponent
Opponents
Defense

More quotes by 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.
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Those graces which from their presumed facility encourage all to attempt an imitation of them, are usually the most inimitable.
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He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
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God is as great in minuteness as He is in magnitude.
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Duke Chartres used to boast that no man could have less real value for character than himself, yet he would gladly give twenty thousand pounds for a good one, because he could immediately make double that sum by means of it.
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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.
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Professors in every branch of the sciences, prefer their own theories to truth: the reason is that their theories are private property, but truth is common stock.
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Secrecy is the soul of all great designs.
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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.
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The present time has one advantage over every other -- it is our own.
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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.
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In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
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As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.
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Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.
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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.
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Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is better to have wisdom without learning than learning without wisdom.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
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Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.
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Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.
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