Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Reading serves as a good escape when you're in the middle of doing crazy things.

I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.

...the number one reason knitters knit is because they are so smart that they need knitting to make boring things interesting.

Indeed, the highest pleasure of golf may be that on the fairways and far from all the pressures of commerce and rationality, we can feel immortal for a few hours.

In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.

To play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth

It is wonderful to see persons of sense passing away a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards.

Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.

What we attempt to do is not without danger. What we attempt to do may not succeed. But it is right and it is just. We act for the good of all.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty.

And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, 'how do we live?'

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind.

I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover 25 miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed.

Keep flax from fire, and youth from gaming.

What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.

Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.

Those who are afraid to fail may not deserve to succeed.

With a book he was regardless of time.

Women who are confident of their abilities are more likely to succeed than those who lack confidence, even though the latter may be much more competent and talented and industrious.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

Masturbation is the thinking man's television.

I enjoy the idea that even though I'm resting, I'm accomplishing something by reading a book.

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent or praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe.