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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
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Charles Colton
Though
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Utterly
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Others
Useless
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Men
Habit
Recondite
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Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
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There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.
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He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.
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To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.
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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.
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Pride requires very costly food-its keeper's happiness.
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Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife, unless the one is about to be sold, the other to be buried.
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None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.
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It is with honesty in one particular as with wealth,--those that have the thing care less about the credit of it than those who have it not. No poor man can well afford to be thought so, and the less of honesty a finished rogue possesses the less he can afford to be supposed to want it.
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A wise minister would rather preserve peace than gain a victory, because he knows that even the most successful war leaves nations generally more poor, always more profligate, than it found them.
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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.
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Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.
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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.
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The man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are.
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It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.
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Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
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The firmest of friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
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Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.
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Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.
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The masses procure their opinions ready made in open market.
Charles Caleb Colton