Quotes from Charles Caleb Colton

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.

Slight sorrow for sin is sufficient, provided it at the same time produces amendment.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

Alas! how has the social spirit of Christianity been perverted by fools at one time, and by knaves and bigots at another; by the self-tormentors of the cell, and the all-tormentors of the conclave!

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win.

Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.

Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.

Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were, by a coup de main,, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart.

As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.

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

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.