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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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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Vessel
First
Wine
Trying
Prove
Trust
Whether
Water
Leaky
Order
Prudence
Firsts

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.
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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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All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, by by rising above them.
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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Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.
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It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Like the rainbow, peace rests upon the earth, but its arch is lost in heaven. Heaven bathes it in hues of light--it springs up amid tears and clouds--it is a reflection of the eternal sun--it is an assurance of calm--it is the sign of a great covenant between God and man--it is an emanation from the distant orb of immortal light.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Self-love, in a well-regulated breast, is as the steward of the household, superintending the expenditure, and seeing that benevolence herself should be prudential, in order to be permanent, by providing that the reservoir which feeds should also be fed.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things first, that such persons do not understand themselves and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is a mistake, that a lust for power is the mark of a great mind for even the weakest have been captivated by it and for minds of the highest order, it has no charms.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are three difficulties in authorship-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game in which the Booksellers are the Kings The Critics the Knaves the Public, the Pack and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.
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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Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The only kind office performed for us by our friends of which we never complain is our funeral and the only thing which we most want, happens to be the only thing we never purchase--our coffin.
Charles Caleb Colton