"Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another"
About this Quote
A liar’s blind spot is not morality; it’s imagination. Colton’s line works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. We’re trained to think the honest person is vulnerable and the schemer is omniscient. He argues the opposite: the practiced deceiver is uniquely disarmed by integrity, not because integrity is naive, but because it refuses to play on the same cognitive board.
The specific intent is corrective and a little scolding. Colton isn’t praising virtue in a vacuum; he’s describing how vice distorts perception. “Full of trick and duplicity” implies a mind so habituated to manipulation that it reads every action as strategy. Straightforward integrity becomes illegible, the way a person fluent only in sarcasm can’t hear sincerity without suspecting a punchline. That’s the subtext: dishonesty doesn’t just harm others, it colonizes the self, narrowing the range of motives you can recognize as real.
The sentence is built like a trap: “Nothing so completely baffles” sets up a totalizing claim, then “than” delivers the twist. The bafflement isn’t produced by cleverer trickery, but by simplicity. Integrity wins not by overpowering deception, but by opting out of the entire economy of feints and counters.
Context matters. Colton, a British clergyman-turned-writer known for sharp aphorisms, was writing in a culture obsessed with respectability, social performance, and the quiet leverage of reputation. In that world, integrity isn’t just a personal virtue; it’s a disruptive force that denies manipulators their usual leverage: the assumption that everyone has a price, a mask, a secret.
The specific intent is corrective and a little scolding. Colton isn’t praising virtue in a vacuum; he’s describing how vice distorts perception. “Full of trick and duplicity” implies a mind so habituated to manipulation that it reads every action as strategy. Straightforward integrity becomes illegible, the way a person fluent only in sarcasm can’t hear sincerity without suspecting a punchline. That’s the subtext: dishonesty doesn’t just harm others, it colonizes the self, narrowing the range of motives you can recognize as real.
The sentence is built like a trap: “Nothing so completely baffles” sets up a totalizing claim, then “than” delivers the twist. The bafflement isn’t produced by cleverer trickery, but by simplicity. Integrity wins not by overpowering deception, but by opting out of the entire economy of feints and counters.
Context matters. Colton, a British clergyman-turned-writer known for sharp aphorisms, was writing in a culture obsessed with respectability, social performance, and the quiet leverage of reputation. In that world, integrity isn’t just a personal virtue; it’s a disruptive force that denies manipulators their usual leverage: the assumption that everyone has a price, a mask, a secret.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
|---|---|
| Source | Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words (first published 1820) — aphorism appearing in Colton's Lacon. |
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