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Secrecy is the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions than by discovering those of our enemy.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Discovering
Intention
Design
Perhaps
Effected
Enemy
Concealing
Soul
Designs
Great
Secrecy
Intentions

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.
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
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Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A cool blooded and crafty politician, when he would be thoroughly revenged on his enemy, makes the injuries which have been inflicted, not on himself, but on others, the pretext of his attack. He thus engages the world as a partisan in his quarrel, and dignifies his private hate, by giving it the air of disinterested resentment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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As there are none so weak that we may venture to injure them with impunity, so there are none so low that they may not at some time be able to repay an obligation. Therefore, what benevolence would dictate, prudence would confirm.
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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It is curious that we pay statesmen for what they say, not for what they do and judge of them from what they do, not from what they say. Hence they have one code of maxims for profession and another for practice, and make up their consciences as the Neapolitans do their beds, with one set of furniture for show and another for use.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Deformity of the heart I call The worst deformity of all For what is form, or what is face, But the soul's index, or its case?
Charles Caleb Colton
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The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy many a speech to a sentence and many a folio to a primer.
Charles Caleb Colton
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That alliance may be said to have a double tie, where the minds are united as well as the body and the union will have all its strength when both the links are in perfection together.
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 may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done and when they disapprove you, what good.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When certain persons abuse us, let us ask ourselves what description of characters it is that they admire we shall often find this a very consolatory question.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It was served of the Jesuits, that they constantly inculcated a thorough contempt of worldly things in their doctrines, but eagerly grasped at them in their lives. They were wise in their generation for they cried down worldly things because they wanted to obtain them, and cried up spiritual things, because they wanted to dispose of them.
Charles Caleb Colton