Quotes from Charles Caleb Colton

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

That alliance may be said to have a double tie, where the minds are united as well as the body; and the union will have all its strength when both the links are in perfection together.

There are three kinds of power,--wealth, strength, and talent; but as old age always weakens, often destroys, the two latter, the aged are induced to cling with the greater avidity to the former.

Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.

Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.

For one man who sincerely pities our misfortunes, there are a thousand who sincerely hate our success.

Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service, and pays the bitterest wages. Its service is to watch the success of one's enemy; its wages to be sure of it.

Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit.

The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.

Cheerfulness ought to be the viaticum vitae of their life to the old; age without cheerfulness is a Lapland winter without a sun.

There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports us - when we succeed, it betrays us.

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Of two evils, it is perhaps less injurious to society, that good doctrine should be accompanied by a bad life, than that a good life should lend its support to a bad doctrine.

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

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

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.