Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1832) was an English cleric, writer and collector, well known for his eccentricities.
Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.
Villainy that is vigilant will be an overmatch for virtue, if she slumber at her post.
Physicians must discover the weaknesses of the human mind, and even condescend to humor them, or they will never be called in to cure the infirmities of the body.
There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.
Some are cursed with the fullness of satiety; and how can they bear the ills of life when its very pleasures fatigue them?
No improvement that takes place in either sex can possibly be confined to itself. Each is a universal mirror to each, and the respective refinement of the one will always be in reciprocal proportion to the polish of the other.
There is a diabolical trio existing in the natural man, implacable, inextinguishable, co-operative and consentaneous, pride, envy, and hate; pride that makes us fancy we deserve all the goods that others possess; envy that some should be admired while we are overlooked; and hate, because all that is bestowed on others, diminishes the sum we think due to ourselves.
Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.
Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.
The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.
No disorders have employed so many quacks, as those that have no cure; and no sciences have exercised so many quills, as those that have no certainty.
The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.
Make the most of the day, by determining to spend it on two sorts of acquaintances only--those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something may be learned.
The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.
The seat of perfect contentment is in the head; for every individual is thoroughly satisfied with his own proportion of brains.
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.
It is a common observation that any fool can get money; but they are not wise that think so.