Quote

There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.

Charles Caleb Colton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Dull
Command
Reader
Piquant
Influence
Needless
Authorship
Carelessness
Correctness
Readers

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

Image
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her ease is desperate and if she goes greater lengths than the men, and leaves the pale of propriety farther behind her, it is because she is aware that all return is prohibited, and by none so strongly as by her own sex.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
The most zealous converters are always the most rancorous when they fail of producing conversion.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
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
Image
Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices, it is of both genders yet, because wounded vanity and slighted love are the two most powerful excitements to revenge, it has been thought, perhaps, to rage with more violence in the female heart.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Envy is the coward side of Hate, And all her ways are bleak and desolate.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do therefore never go abroad in search of your wants if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you for he that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
As a man of pleasure, by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be, is often more miserable than most men are, so the sceptic, in a vain attempt to be wise beyond what is permitted to man, plunges into a darkness more deplorable, and a blindness more incurable than that of the common herd, whom he despises, and would fain instruct.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Some men are very entertaining for a first interview, but after that they are exhausted, and run out on a second meeting we shall find them flat and monotonous like hand-organs, we have heard all their tunes.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Words indeed are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one it is established, and it is understood.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, by by rising above them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Image
Perfection doesn't exist... only good attempts.
Charles Caleb Colton