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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
Men
Habit
Recondite
Whose
Possessors
Shall
Inactive
Though
Qualifications
Chance
Utterly
Upon
Owners
Times
Habits
Others
Useless
Acquirements

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Physicians must discover the weaknesses of the human mind, and even condescend to humor them, or they will never be called in to cure the infirmities of the body.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another's weakness, thousands have been destroyed by a false appreciation of their own strength.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness but we ought rather to suspect our own.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Envy ought to have no place allowed it in the hearts of people for the goods of this present world are so vile and low that they are beneath it and those of the future world are so vast and exalted that they are above it.
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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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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Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists--and I am inclined to think it is so--it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.
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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Sincerely to aspire after virtue, is to gain her and zealously to labour after her wages, is to receive them.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.
Charles Caleb Colton