Charles Caleb Colton

“I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.”

“Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.”

“We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.”

“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, produ...”

“When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.”

“We ask advice, but we mean approbation.”

“Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty...”

“Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.”

“The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shel...”

“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.”

“Avarice has ruined more souls than extravagance.”

“The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.”

“To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports us - when we succeed, it betrays us.”

“To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.”

“Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkes...”

“Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.”

“The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.”

“Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.”

“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 drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.”