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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
Firm
Honesty
Knavery
Supple
Upright
Yields
Bend
Yield

More quotes by 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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The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.
Charles Caleb Colton
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That an author's work is the mirror of his mind is a position that has led to very false conclusions. If Satan himself were to write a book it would be in praise of virtue, because the good would purchase it for use, and the bad for ostentation.
Charles Caleb Colton
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By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.
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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We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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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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
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There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
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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Of all the marvelous works of God, perhaps the one angels view with the most supreme astonishment, is a proud man.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The further we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead.
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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Some men who know that they are great are so very haughty withal and insufferable that their acquaintance discover their greatness only by the tax of humility which they are obliged to pay as the price of their friendship.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Those that will not permit their wealth to do any good for others. . . cut themselves off from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness later.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A coxcomb begins by determining that his own profession is the first and he finishes by deciding that he is the first of profession.
Charles Caleb Colton