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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.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Sentences
Maxim
Sweeping
Indeed
Maxims
Speech
Quotations
Pygmy
Literature
Giant
Primer
Many
Reduce
Grecian
Would
Sentence
Clause
Giants
Clauses

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves it is civil war.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Fortune has been considered the guardian divinity of fools and, on this score, she has been accused of blindness but it should rather be adduced as a proof of her sagacity, when she helps those who cannot help themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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
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He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be and he that studies men, will know how things are.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.
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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Deformity of the heart I call The worst deformity of all For what is form, or what is face, But the soul's index, or its case?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built--time and space, life and death, matter and mind?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most men know what they hate, few what they love.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In order to try whether a vessel be leaky, we first prove it with water before we trust it with wine.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In all societies, it is advisable to associate if possible with the highest not that the highest are always the best, but because, if disgusted there, we can descend at any time but if we begin with the lowest, to ascend is impossible.
Charles Caleb Colton