Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

A man's virtue is best secured by shame, and best improved by emulation in the society of virtuous men.

It is by doing good that we become good.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the contrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short.

No man, however enslaved to his appetites, or hurried by his passions, can, while he preserves his intellects unimpaired, please himself with promoting the corruption of others. He whose merit has enlarged his influence would surely wish to exert it for the benefit of mankind. Yet such will be the effect of his reputation, while he suffers himself to indulge in any favourite fault, that they who have no hope to reach his excellence will catch at his failings, and his virtues will be cited to justify the copiers of his vices.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

Good men are bad men's instructors, And bad men are good men's materials.

Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

Is virtue raised by culture, or self-sown?

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Every home is a house of learning either for good or otherwise.

The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.

The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.

Our characters are the result of our conduct.