Explore Quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.

The policy that can strike only while the iron is hot will be overcome by that perseverance, which ... can make that iron hot by striking and he that can only rule the storm must yield to him who can both raise and rule it.

Heaven may have happiness as utterly unknown to us as the gift of perfect vision would be to a man born blind. If we consider the inlets of pleasure from five senses only, we may be sure that the same Being who created us could have given us five hundred, if He had pleased.

He that has never suffered extreme adversity knows not the full extent of his own depravation.

My lowest days as a Christian have been more fulfilling and rewarding than all the days of glory in the White House.

Be real and adjust you strategy according to honest results.

Most importantly: Don't adjust your results to build up the ego of the chief strategist. Especially if the strategist is you.

An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude

By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind; but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.

There are three kinds of praise, that which we yield, that which we lend, and that which we pay. We yield it to the powerful from fear, we lend it to the weak from interest, and we pay it to the deserving from gratitude.

We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.

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

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.

How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow.

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.

Pride is less ashamed of being ignorant, than of being instructed, and she looks too high to find that, which very often lies beneath her.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.