Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton writes like a man trying to take the comfort out of moral neutrality. The line doesn’t leave room for the soothing modern idea that you can be basically fine and stay that way. Instead, it frames character as kinetic: you’re either gaining moral altitude or losing it, because time itself is a conveyor belt. The sting is in “infallibly” and “as certainly” - not advice, not even warning, but a kind of moral physics.

The intent is disciplinary. Colton is arguing against complacency and the fantasy of stable virtue. “Good” isn’t a possession you bank; it’s a practice you either compound or neglect. Likewise “bad” isn’t a fixed identity so much as a trajectory. That framing carries subtext: if you’re sliding, you can’t blame a single dramatic downfall. The real culprit is drift - the quiet accumulation of small permissions, the tiny lapses that time dutifully turns into habit.

His triad - “vice, virtue and time” - is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. Pairing time with moral qualities makes ethics feel less like private sentiment and more like an ecosystem with its own laws. Nothing “stands still,” so the moral life becomes a matter of direction, not self-image.

In Colton’s early-19th-century Britain, this reads like a pocket-sized sermon for a culture steeped in Protestant self-scrutiny and improvement literature, where respectability was currency and “character” was destiny. It’s also a preemptive strike on rationalization: if you’re waiting to become better later, time is already voting against you.