Charles Caleb Colton
Charles Caleb Colton
Charles Caleb Coltonwas an English cleric, writer and collector, well known for his eccentricities...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
sex vanity rivals
There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.
women decorum length
Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.
men fog circles
The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.
order matter mystery
We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.
book healthy may
Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.
promise mathematics metaphysics
The science of mathematics performs more than it promises, but the science of metaphysics promises more than it performs.
dust desert littles
Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.
strong men thinking
If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists--and I am inclined to think it is so--it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool.
heart angel men
If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels.
ignorance pedants disgusting
Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.
air might physicians
Some persons will tell you, with an air of the miraculous, that they recovered although they were given over; whereas they might with more reason have said, they recovered because they were given over.
men lust fortune
Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation.
ignorance knowledge men
A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.
song writing pay
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.