Quotes from Charles Caleb Colton

If merited, no courage can stand against its just indignation.

Courage is generosity of the highest order for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things.

Death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt.

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.

Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.

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.

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.

Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

Revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude

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.

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

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

Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain.

It is far better to borrow experience than to buy it.

Doubt is the vestibule of faith.

The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other

Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

True contentment depends not upon what we have a tub was large enough for Diogenes but a world was too little for Alexander.

Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.

Most of our misfortunes are comments of our friends upon them.