Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

A secret, in Colton's hands, isn’t a sacred trust; it’s a social accessory. The line lands because it flips our usual moral hierarchy. We expect the keeper of secrets to be the discreet, the loyal, the virtuous. Colton’s target is the opposite type: the person who collects confidences the way some people collect gossip columns, not to safeguard them but to feel important while they last. The “fondness” is the tell. This isn’t duty or intimacy; it’s infatuation with the aura of privileged knowledge.

The barb is sharpened by the neat paradox: those least committed to silence are most attracted to secrecy. That contradiction exposes secrecy as currency. To “have” a secret confers status, proximity, and leverage, even if only for a moment before it’s spent. The subtext is almost transactional: people who can’t resist repeating a secret aren’t betraying you accidentally; they’re cashing it in.

Colton wrote in an era that prized manners, reputation, and the tight social economies of drawing rooms and clerical circles. In such environments, information moved quietly but decisively, shaping marriages, careers, and standing. The quote reads like a field note from someone who’s watched respectability operate as theater and understands that “confidentiality” is often a pose. It also doubles as a warning: don’t judge trustworthiness by how eagerly someone invites secrets. The hungriest listeners may be shopping, not sheltering.