Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

No one every suddenly became depraved.

It is very rare to find ground which produces nothing; if it is not covered with flowers, with fruit trees and grains, it produces briers and pines. It is the same with man; if he is not virtuous, he becomes vicious.

The men were all scumbags, but the whole point of the film is to show the development of that. Each guy is going in there to have a good time. By and large, these men are career men, family men, and you just see the deterioration of them.

There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.

He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

I take it to be from the greatest extremes, both in virtue and in vice, that the uniformly virtuous and reformed in life can derive the greatest and most salutary truths and impressions.

Praise makes good men better and bad men worse.

That every man shall be made virtuous by any process whatever is, indeed, no more to be expected than that every tree shall be made to bear fruit, and every plant nourishment.

Men's evil manners live in brass: their virtues we write in water.

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

Men become old, but they never become good.

It is easier to enrich ourselves with a thousand virtues, than to correct ourselves of a single fault.

The largest part of goodness is the will to become good.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. Scout

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

Time indeed changes manners and notions, and so far we must expect institutions to bend to them. But time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch, and if the gangrene is to prevail at last, let the day be kept off as long as possible.

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

A fool has not stuff enough to make a good man.

For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character