Success Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton turns the supposedly solitary act of reading into a social ethic: choose carefully, commit deeply, and resist the prestige-hoarding impulse that treats books as trophies. The line has the moral snap of early 19th-century self-help before “self-help” existed, written in a culture where literacy and private libraries were rising markers of taste. He’s speaking to a newly expanding reading public tempted by volume for volume’s sake, and he counters with curation as character.

The craft is in the parallelism. “Books, like friends” is more than a simile; it’s a quiet rebuke. If you collect people for status, you’re shallow. If you collect books for status, you’re equally unserious. The repetition of “Like friends” tightens the analogy into a standard of behavior. Reading becomes not consumption but loyalty: you “return” rather than “move on.”

Colton’s subtext is also defensive. Human friendships are messy, contingent, sometimes disappointing. Books, he insists, offer the fantasy of companionship without betrayal: “never fail us.” That’s both consoling and a little suspicious, as if he’s trying to launder the need for control into virtue. Still, the phrasing sells it. The triple “never” works like a drumbeat, transforming a preference into a promise. Even the slightly archaic “cloy” (to sicken with excess) is a preemptive answer to the fear of repetition: the right book, like the right friend, deepens rather than dulls.

It’s an argument for rereading as maturity: not novelty, but calibration - returning to what tests you, steadies you, and keeps teaching after the first glow fades.