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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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Many a man may thank his talent for his rank, but no man has ever been able to return the compliment by thanking his rank for his talent.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are three difficulties in authorship-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game in which the Booksellers are the Kings The Critics the Knaves the Public, the Pack and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To dare to live alone is the rarest courage since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There can be no Christianity where there is no charity
Charles Caleb Colton
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How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.
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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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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Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.
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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A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.
Charles Caleb Colton
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They that are loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. It is probable that he who is killed by lightning hears no noise but the thunder-clap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than to persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.
Charles Caleb Colton
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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.
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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Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
Charles Caleb Colton