Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line lands like a moral slap because it reverses the usual suspect. Extravagance is the flashy vice, the one you can photograph: silk, champagne, debt. Avarice is quieter, easier to rationalize as “prudence” or “responsibility.” By claiming greed destroys more souls than waste, he’s not defending indulgence so much as exposing the respectability of hoarding. Extravagance makes a scene; avarice makes a system.

The intent is surgical: detach virtue from thriftiness and attach it to the condition of the spirit. Extravagance can be reckless, even pathetic, but it doesn’t necessarily require a cold view of other people. Avarice does. It trains the mind to treat every relationship as a transaction and every moment as a ledger entry. The “ruin” here isn’t just bankruptcy; it’s moral corrosion - the slow reduction of a person into a calculator.

Context sharpens the barb. Colton writes from an early-19th-century Britain buzzing with commercial expansion, new money, and the anxious Protestant ethic that tried to turn accumulation into evidence of worth. In that climate, greed can wear a clean collar. Colton punctures that self-congratulation: the respectable vice, he suggests, is the one most likely to escape scrutiny.

Subtext: society loves condemning the spender because it’s visible and safely individual. Greed is harder to prosecute because it’s often rewarded, institutionalized, even praised as “discipline.” Colton isn’t romanticizing excess; he’s warning that the ugliest sins are the ones that pass as common sense.