Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Out of five hundred who speak glibly of love, not one can spell the first letter of his name.

High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.

If you're gonna pretend to be something, then you have to at least live up to what it is.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

There are people who laugh to show their fine teeth; and there are those who cry to show their good hearts.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

Pride perceiving humility honorable, often borrows her cloak.

One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.

Fewer possess virtue, than those who wish us to believe that they possess it.

Virtue is not photogenic.

For many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue.

One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.

Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies; Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies

Economized love is never real love.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

Hypocrisy itself does great honor, or rather justice, to religion, and tacitly acknowledges it to be an ornament to human nature. The hypocrite would not be at so much pains to put on the appearance of virtue, if he did not know it was the most proper and effectual means to gain the love and esteem of mankind.

It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility.

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

To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.

The love is real in any situation; everything else is just an illusion.

Honest men love women; those who deceive them adore them.