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When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things first, that such persons do not understand themselves and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Things
Understand
Converse
Write
Converses
Others
Suspect
Two
Suspects
Persons
Worthy
Firsts
Meet
Confusedly
First
Understood
Obscurely
Writing
Style
Secondly

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.
Charles Caleb Colton
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All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Patience is the support of weakness impatience the ruin of strength.
Charles Caleb Colton
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He [the miser] falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities nor its pleasures for his trouble.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In order to try whether a vessel be leaky, we first prove it with water before we trust it with wine.
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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Perfection doesn't exist... only good attempts.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The seat of perfect contentment is in the head for every individual is thoroughly satisfied with his own proportion of brains.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When a man has displayed talent in some particular path, and left all competitors behind him in it, the world are too apt to give him credit for universality of genius, and to anticipate for him success in all that he undertakes.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Women generally consider consequences in love, seldom in resentment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pride requires very costly food-its keeper's happiness.
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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When we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things, their good opinion and our own improvement for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.
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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Deformity of the heart I call The worst deformity of all For what is form, or what is face, But the soul's index, or its case?
Charles Caleb Colton
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Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Charles Caleb Colton