Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line is a social hygiene warning dressed up as manners. “No company is preferable to bad” sounds like a prim aphorism, but the engine underneath is suspicion: other people are not neutral; they are vectors. The second sentence sharpens the threat with a medical metaphor that would have landed hard in the early 1800s, when “disease” wasn’t an abstract analogy but an everyday possibility. By comparing vice to contagion, Colton borrows the authority of the body to police the soul.

The rhetorical move is slyly asymmetrical. Virtue is framed as fragile, almost passive, while vice is aggressive, opportunistic, self-replicating. That imbalance isn’t just pessimism; it’s a justification for withdrawal. If corruption spreads more easily than goodness, then loneliness becomes not a failure of sociability but a disciplined choice, even a moral duty. The subtext flatters the reader: you are refined enough to be at risk, clean enough to be “infected.”

There’s also class anxiety humming in the background. “Bad company” rarely means the powerful behaving badly; it usually means the wrong crowd, the unvetted, the socially downward. Colton’s advice works like an early etiquette algorithm: curate your circle or accept the consequences. Read now, it feels uncannily modern - a pre-digital version of “your feed is shaping you.” The catch is that it can harden into moral quarantine, where avoiding contamination becomes easier than doing the harder work of influence, solidarity, or forgiveness.