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Knavery is supple, and can bend, but honesty is firm and upright and yields not.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Upright
Yields
Bend
Yield
Firm
Honesty
Knavery
Supple

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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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
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Genius, in one respect, is like gold numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.
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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Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Some frauds succeed from the apparent candor, the open confidence, and the full blaze of ingenuousness that is thrown around them. The slightest mystery would excite suspicion and ruin all. Such stratagems may be compared to the stars they are discoverable by darkness and hidden only by light.
Charles Caleb Colton
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War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most men know what they hate, few what they love.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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They that are loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. It is probable that he who is killed by lightning hears no noise but the thunder-clap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that aspires to be the head of a party will find it more difficult to please his friends than to perplex his foes. He must often act from false reasons which are weak, because he dares not avow the true reasons which are strong.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In all places, and in all times, those religionists who have believed too much have been more inclined to violence and persecution than those who have believed too little.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It has been shrewdly said, that when, men abuse us we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise which censure which we do not deserve and still more rare to despise praise which we do.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every other loss, and by the act of suicide, renounces earth to forfeit Heaven.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton