Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

You can be dressed the best and have a wicked heart.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

You smile with pomp and rigor, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue and get murdered time after time.

Men may die like lambs and yet have their place forever with the goats.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs; for truth, like light, travels only in straight lines.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’ – Book 3, Chapter 16

The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.

When a woman is undisguisedly bad, then indeed she is good. [Comparatively speaking, as she at least lacks deception.]

Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? "

A saint abroad, and a devil at home.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

Among the many inconsistencies which folly produces or infirmity suffers in the human mind, there has often been observed a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings... Those whom the appearance of virtue or the evidence of genius has tempted to a nearer knowledge of the writer, in whose performances they may be found, have indeed had frequent reason to repent their curiosity.

Saintliness is also a temptation.