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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

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

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.
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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There are many women who have never intrigued, and many men who have never gamed but those who have done either but once are very extraordinary animals.
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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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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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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built--time and space, life and death, matter and mind?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Happiness ... leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Genius, in one respect, is like gold numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Constant success shows us but one side of the world adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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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The cynic who twitted Aristippus by observing that the philosopher who could dine on herbs might despise the company of a king, was well replied to by Aristippus, when he remarked that the philosopher who could enjoy the company or a king might also despise a dinner of herbs.
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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As we ascend in society, like those who climb a mountain, we shall find that the line of perpetual congelation commences with the higher circles and the nearer we approach to the grand luminary the court, the more frigidity and apathy shall we experience.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We ask advice but we mean approbation.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Happiness is that single and glorious thing which is the very light and sun of the whole animated universe and where she is not it were better that nothing should be.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The upright, if he suffer calumny to move him, fears the tongue of man more than the eye of God.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.
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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There are three modes of bearing the ills of life by indifference, which is the most common by philosophy, which is the most ostentatious and by religion, which is the most effectual.
Charles Caleb Colton