Charles Caleb Colton Biography Quotes 70 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Charles Caleb Colton was born in 1780 in the west of England, the son of the Rev. Charles Colton, a Church of England clergyman. His earliest world was the rectory: sermons, parish calls, and the constant measuring of private conduct against public duty. That atmosphere mattered. It trained him to listen for moral contradiction, but it also taught him how easily reputation can substitute for character - a theme that would later sharpen into his aphorisms about power, hypocrisy, and self-deception.

He came of age as Britain moved from the long strain of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France into the anxious, reform-haunted peace that followed 1815. The era was thick with pamphleteering, religious controversy, and political satire; moral discourse was a public sport. Colton absorbed that argumentative culture early, and his later writing would sound like a clergyman who had learned, sometimes painfully, that the pulpit is not a sanctuary from human appetite.

Education and Formative Influences
Colton studied at Eton College and then at King's College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in the first years of the nineteenth century. Cambridge gave him classical models of sententiae and moral epigram, while London and the periodical press showed how quickly a sentence could travel when sharpened into a maxim. Ordained in the Church of England, he entered the clerical profession with a mind already split between devotional language and the brisk, worldly tone of the satirist.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
After ordination he held livings in Sussex and elsewhere, gaining a reputation as a capable preacher and an energetic social presence, but also as a man vulnerable to gambling and debt - liabilities that would eventually imperil his clerical standing. He published poems and prose, including the poem "Hypocrisy" (1812), before finding his enduring form in aphorism: "Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words" (first issued in the 1820s, expanded in later editions) distilled theology, politics, and drawing-room psychology into compact judgments. Financial pressure and scandal drove him abroad; in the early 1830s he was in Paris, where he died in 1832, reportedly by suicide, his end echoing the very moral precariousness he anatomized.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Colton's best writing is driven by a conflicted inner life: the moralist who knows the taste of temptation, and therefore speaks with both authority and suspicion. He wrote in the compressed style of the epigrammatist - short clauses, balanced antitheses, and images vivid enough to carry ethical weight. In an age intoxicated by both reformist rhetoric and reactionary fear, he treated politics as a test of character under pressure. His suspicion of unchecked authority is not theoretical but experiential, the product of watching institutions - church, state, and self - rationalize their own appetites. "Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power". The sentence reads like a warning posted on the door of every office, including his own conscience.

He also understood moral collapse as cumulative, a process with momentum, not a single fall. "Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase". That image captures Colton's psychological realism: he rarely depicts vice as exotic; it is ordinary, incremental, and therefore hard to confess until it is too late. Yet he was not a cynic about knowledge or reform. His work repeatedly insists that wisdom begins in discomfort rather than certainty, that intellectual humility is the precondition of genuine conviction. "Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom". In a culture of partisan certainty, Colton's aphorisms press the reader to interrogate motives, especially their own, and to treat self-scrutiny as a civic virtue.

Legacy and Influence
Colton's reputation has long been shaped by the contrast between his clerical vocation and his troubled private finances, but his literary afterlife rests on "Lacon" and the way its maxims entered English quotation culture. He helped popularize the nineteenth-century aphorism as a portable form of moral philosophy - suitable for sermons, speeches, and later anthologies - and his best lines continue to be cited because they translate personal weakness and institutional danger into memorable images. If his life illustrates the costs of self-division, his writing endures as a compact record of the era's anxieties about power, integrity, and the difficult labor of becoming wise.

Our collection contains 70 quotes who is written by Charles, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Mortality.

• Charles Caleb Colton imitation: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a quote by Charles Caleb Colton highlighting that copying someone's work or actions is a sign of admiration.
• How old was Charles Caleb Colton? He became 52 years old

• 1820 Lacon: or, Many things in few words (Book)
• 1816 The Reform: or, How Would You Have It? (Play)
• 1814 Napoleon: A Poem (Poem)
• 1812 Hypocrisy: A Satirical Poem (Poem)

• Wikipedia: Charles Caleb Colton