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Antithesis may be the blossom of wit, but it will never arrive at maturity unless sound sense be the trunk and truth the root.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
May
Wit
Never
Root
Roots
Trunk
Unless
Antithesis
Style
Trunks
Sound
Blossom
Sense
Arrive
Truth
Maturity

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention there are many books that owe their success to two things good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them
Charles Caleb Colton
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Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave
Charles Caleb Colton
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The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
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A hug is worth a thousand words.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is doubtful whether mankind are most indebted to those who like Bacon and Butler dig the gold from the mine of literature, or to those who, like Paley, purify it, stamp it, fix its real value, and give it currency and utility
Charles Caleb Colton
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Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book and if it be a good book, it wants it not.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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No propagation or multiplication is more rapid that that of evil, unless it be checked no growth more certain.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty.
Charles Caleb Colton
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By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual.
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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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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In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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
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A Christian builds his fortitude on a better foundation than stoicism he is pleased with every thing that happens, because he knows it could not happen unless it first pleased God, and that which pleases Him must be best.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is best, if possible, to deceive no one for he that ... begins by deceiving others, will end ... by deceiving himself.
Charles Caleb Colton