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Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Better
Diffidence
Termed
Valour
Discretion
Knowledge
Part
Certain

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The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason.
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To dare to live alone is the rarest courage since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
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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
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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.
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Two things, well considered, would prevent many quarrels: first, to have it well ascertained whether we are not disputing about terms, rather than things and, secondly, to examine whether that on which we differ is worth contending about.
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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.
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Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.
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Doubt is the vestibule of faith.
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Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.
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That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.
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What is earthly happiness? that phantom of which we hear so much, and see so little whose promises are constantly given and constantly broken, but as constantly believed that cheats us with the sound instead of the substance, and with the blossom instead of the fruit. Like Juno, she is a goddess in pursuit, but a cloud in possession.
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It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.
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Fortune, like other females, prefers a lover to a master, and submits with impatience to control but he that wooes her with opportunity and importunity will seldom court her in vain.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most men know what they hate, few what they love.
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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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.
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Constant success shows us but one side of the world adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.
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Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.
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If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win.
Charles Caleb Colton