Charles Caleb Colton

Doubt is the vestibule of faith.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Mystery magnifies danger as the fog the sun.

— Charles Caleb Colton

You cannot separate charity and religion.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Pride requires very costly food-its keeper's happiness.

— Charles Caleb Colton

We ask advice but we mean approbation.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Happiness ... leads none of us by the same route.

— Charles Caleb Colton

If the prodigal quits life in debt to others, the miser quits it still deeper in debt to himself.

— Charles Caleb Colton

It is good to act as if. It is even better to grow to the point where it is no longer an…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Make no enemies; he is insignificant indeed that can do thee no harm.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.

— Charles Caleb Colton

We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their sterling and intrinsic merit.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Sometimes the greatest adversities turn out to be the greatest blessings.

— Charles Caleb Colton

Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.

— Charles Caleb Colton

To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could; but to be a critic…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace.…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs; for truth, like light,…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never…

— Charles Caleb Colton

If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her ease is desperate; and if she goes greater lengths than the…

— Charles Caleb Colton

The wise man has his follies, no less than the fool; but it has been said that herein lies the difference--the follies…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Pride differs in many things from vanity, and by gradations that never blend, although they may be somewhat indistinguishable. Pride may perhaps…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non…

— Charles Caleb Colton

A thorough-paced knave will rarely quarrel with one whom he can cheat: his revenge is plunder; therefore he is usually the most…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices,…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quantum that a man can…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There is not a little generalship and stratagem required in the managing and marshalling of our pleasures, so that each shall not…

— Charles Caleb Colton

It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in…

— Charles Caleb Colton

No two things differ more than hurry and dispatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, dispatch of a strong one.…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Others, again, give us the mere carcass of another man’s thoughts, but deprived of all their life and spirit, and this is…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There is no quality of the mind, or of the body, that so instantaneously and irresistibly captivates, as wit. An elegant writer…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Pleasure is to a woman what the sun is to the flower: if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves;…

— Charles Caleb Colton