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Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Diffidence
Uncertainty
Knowledge
Part
Better

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things.
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No improvement that takes place in either sex can possibly be confined to itself. Each is a universal mirror to each, and the respective refinement of the one will always be in reciprocal proportion to the polish of the other.
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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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The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We must be careful how we flatter fools too little, or wise men too much, for the flatterer must act the very reverse of the physician, and administer the strongest dose only to the weakest patient.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Sensibility would be a good portress if she had but one hand with her right she opens the door to pleasure, but with her left to pain.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could but to be a critic of true taste and feeling is what no man without genius could be if he would.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is with honesty in one particular as with wealth,--those that have the thing care less about the credit of it than those who have it not. No poor man can well afford to be thought so, and the less of honesty a finished rogue possesses the less he can afford to be supposed to want it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Riches may enable us to confer favors, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.
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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When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more often he contemplates them, the former will grow greater, and the latter less.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her ease is desperate and if she goes greater lengths than the men, and leaves the pale of propriety farther behind her, it is because she is aware that all return is prohibited, and by none so strongly as by her own sex.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
Charles Caleb Colton