Quote

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

Charles Caleb Colton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

Image
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
Image
Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
The most ridiculous of all animals is a proud priest he cannot use his own tools without cutting his own fingers.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Is there anything more tedious than the often repeated tales of the old and forgetful?
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs for truth, like light, travels only in straight lines.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
The wise man has his follies, no less than the fool but it has been said that herein lies the difference--the follies of the fool are known to the world, but hidden from himself the follies of the wise are known to himself, but hidden from the world.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds and inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed nor calls out his powers if pastured out with the common herd, that are destined for the collar and the yoke.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
God is on the side of virtue for whoever dreads punishment suffers it, and whoever deserves it, dreads it .
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.
Charles Caleb Colton