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Charles Caleb Colton

Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

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Famous Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

“Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.”

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Book:Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
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“Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.”

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Book:Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son on men and manners. To which are added, selections from Colton's 'Lacon'.
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“Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.”

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Book:Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
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“Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.”

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Book:Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
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“When all moves equally (says Pascal), nothing seems to move as in a vessel under sail; and when all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so. He that stops first, views as from a fixed point the horrible extravagance that transports the rest.”

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Book:Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think
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“Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices, it is of both genders; yet, because wounded vanity and slighted love are the two most powerful excitements to revenge, it has been thought, perhaps, to rage with more violence in the female heart.”

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Book:Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
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“Natural good is' so intimately connected with moral good, and natural evil with moral evil, that I am as certain as if I heard a voice from heaven proclaim it, that God is on the side of virtue. He has learnt much, and has not lived in vain, who has practically discovered that most strict and necessary connection, that does and will ever exist between vice and misery, and virtue and happiness.”

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Book:Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan
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“In its primary signification, all vice, that is, all excess, brings on its own punishment, even here. By certain fixed, settled and established laws of Him who is the God of nature, excess of every kind destroys that constitution which temperance would preserve. The debauchee offers up his body a "living sacrifice to sin.”

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Book:Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
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“The greatest miracle that the Almighty could perform would be to make a bad man happy, even in heaven; he must unparadise that blessed place to accomplish it. In its primary signification, all vice--that is, all excess--brings its own punishment even here.”

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Book:Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
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“He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.”

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Author:Charles Caleb Colton
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“It has been said that men carry on a kind of coasting trade with religion. In the voyage of life, they profess to be in search of heaven, but take care not to venture so far in their approximations to it, as entirely to lose sight of the earth; and should their frail vessel be in danger of shipwreck, they will gladly throw their darling vices overboard, as other mariners their treasures, only to fish them up again when the storm is over.”

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Book:Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan
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“Those who have resources within themselves, who can dare to live alone, want friends the least, but, at the same time, best know how to prize them the most. But no company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.”

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Book:Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
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