Charles Caleb Colton Quotes About Purpose

Quotes about: Purpose

• When the frustration of my helplessness seemed greatest, I discovered God's grace was more than sufficient. And after my imprisonment, I could look back and see how God used my powerlessness for His purpose. What He has chosen for my most significant witness was not my triumphs or victories, but my defeat.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Frustration, Power, Grace

• No two things differ more than hurry and dispatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, dispatch of a strong one. A weak man in office, like a squirrel in a cage, is laboring eternally, but to no purpose, and is in constant motion without getting on a job; like a turnstile, he is in everybody's way, but stops nobody; he talks a great deal, but says very little; looks into everything but sees nothing; and has a hundred irons in the fire, but very few of them are hot, and with those few that are, he only burns his fingers.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Strong, Jobs, Men

• Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Wise, Math, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.163

• Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Rome, Purpose, Genius

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.239

• The French revolution was a .eune invented and constructed for the purpose of manufacturing liberty; but it had neither lever cogs, nor adjusting powers, and the consequences were that it worked so rapidly that it destroyed its own inventors, and set itself on fire.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fire, Liberty, Cogs

• Courage is like the diamond,--very brilliant; not changed by fire, capable of high polish, but except for the purpose of cutting hard bodies useless.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Courage, Cutting, Fire

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.356

• None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Mean, Secret, Purpose

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.32

• Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Passion, Exercise, Order

• 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.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Kings, Passion, People

  Philip Dormer Stanhope (4th earl of Chesterfield.), Charles Caleb Colton (1861). “Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son on men and manners. To which are added, selections from Colton's 'Lacon'.”, p.206

• All wars of interference, arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of other states; all wars of ambition, carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement; and all wars of aggression, undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions; all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Religious, War, Ambition

  Charles Caleb Colton (1828). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think”, p.228

• For all the practical purposes of life, truth might as well be in a prison as in the folio of a schoolman; and those who release her from her cobwebbed shelf and teach her to live with men have the merit of liberating, if not of discovering, her.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Purpose, Might

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.199

• If there be a pleasure on earth which angels cannot enjoy, and which they might almost envy man the possession of, it is the power of relieving distress--if there be a pain which devils might pity man for enduring, it is the death-bed reflection that we have possessed the power of doing good, but that we have abused and perverted it to purposes of ill.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Pain, Angel, Reflection

  Charles Caleb COLTON (1849). “L.P.”, p.205

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