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We shall at all times chance upon men of recondite acquirements, but whose qualifications, from the incommunicative and inactive habits of their owners, are as utterly useless to others as though the possessors had them not.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Upon
Owners
Times
Habits
Others
Useless
Acquirements
Men
Habit
Recondite
Whose
Possessors
Shall
Inactive
Though
Qualifications
Chance
Utterly

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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The wealth is ultimately just a relative thing. As a person with little money and little more needs to rich guys money but really wishes
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Sloth, if it has prevented many crimes, has also smothered many virtues.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
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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The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every other loss, and by the act of suicide, renounces earth to forfeit Heaven.
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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Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
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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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The interests of society often render it expedient not to utter the whole truth, the interests of science never: for in this field we have much more to fear from the deficiency of truth than from its abundance.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is better to have wisdom without learning than learning without wisdom.
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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It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates and destroys.
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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Secrecy is the soul of all great designs.
Charles Caleb Colton