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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
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Charles Colton
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More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton
A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.
Charles Caleb Colton
War kills men, and men deplore the loss but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.
Charles Caleb Colton
Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices, it is of both genders yet, because wounded vanity and slighted love are the two most powerful excitements to revenge, it has been thought, perhaps, to rage with more violence in the female heart.
Charles Caleb Colton
He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.
Charles Caleb Colton
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
Avarice has ruined more souls than extravagance.
Charles Caleb Colton
The mob is a monster, with the hands of Briareus, but the head of Polyphemus,--strong to execute, but blind to perceive.
Charles Caleb Colton
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
We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury, and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or flattery the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the third.
Charles Caleb Colton
As there are none so weak that we may venture to injure them with impunity, so there are none so low that they may not at some time be able to repay an obligation. Therefore, what benevolence would dictate, prudence would confirm.
Charles Caleb Colton
Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
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
The interests of society often render it expedient not to utter the whole truth, the interests of science never: for in this field we have much more to fear from the deficiency of truth than from its abundance.
Charles Caleb Colton
Honesty is not only the deepest policy, but the highest wisdom since, however difficult it may be for integrity to get on, it is a thousand times more difficult for knavery to get off and no error is more fatal than that of those who think that Virtue has no other reward because they have heard that she is her own.
Charles Caleb Colton
A wise man may be duped as well as a fool but the fool publishes the triumph of his deceiver the wise man is silent, and denies that triumph to an enemy which he would hardly concede to a friend a triumph that proclaims his own defeat.
Charles Caleb Colton
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
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
A hug is worth a thousand words.
Charles Caleb Colton
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
The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.
Charles Caleb Colton
