Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

Adversity has a way of introducing a man to himself.

Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

It is written that adversity introduces us to ourselves.

You can't really know what you are made of until you are tested.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.

For me, exploration is about that journey to the interior, into your own heart. I'm always wondering, how will I act at my moment of truth? Will I rise up and do what's right, even if every fiber of my being is telling me otherwise?

Necessity is cruel, but it is the only test of inward strength. Every fool may live according to his own likings.

I was so afraid that we would just keep colliding over and over again if we stayed together, and that eventually the impact would break me. But now I know I am like the blade and he is like the whetstone- I am too strong to break so easily, and I become better, sharper, every time I touch him.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.

Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone. Slowly slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence—which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence.

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.

All that appears in your life is a blessing, presenting you with a greater opportunity to define who you are, and to know yourself as that.

. . . the whole idea of WHAT HAPPENED WAS.... is not about dating. It is more about people who are not committed to who they are or are indifferent about their life in general, which is how I felt about myself when I wrote it. I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework. . . . I like all those fringy, weird, nonverbal, quiet, tiny little things, those powerful interchanges between people, things that go unsaid, that people know are happening all the time but nobody wants to talk about. That's what I want to make movies about.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

He who knows much about others may be learned, but he who understands himself is more intelligent. He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.