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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

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Is there anything more tedious than the often repeated tales of the old and forgetful?
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Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.
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It is much easier to ruin a man of principle than a man of none, for he may be ruined through his scruples. Knavery is supple and can bend but honesty is firm and upright, and yields not.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The most ridiculous of all animals is a proud priest he cannot use his own tools without cutting his own fingers.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We ask advice but we mean approbation.
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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Mental pleasures never cloy unlike those of the body, they are increased by reputation, approved by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves.
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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Knavery is supple, and can bend, but honesty is firm and upright and yields not.
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The most zealous converters are always the most rancorous when they fail of producing conversion.
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The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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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Villains are usually the worst casuists, and rush into crimes to avoid less. Henry VIII. committed murder to avoid the imputation of adultery and in our times, those who commit the latter crime attempt to wash off the stain of seducing the wife by signifying their readiness to shoot the husband.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.
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He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.
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There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!
Charles Caleb Colton