Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Great writing, Colton suggests, is an elegant con: it makes the reader feel smart while quietly proving the writer is smarter. The line hinges on a double measurement - "real difficulty" and "apparent ease" - and the tension between them is the engine of our admiration. We don’t clap for sweat; we clap for sweat that doesn’t show. A sentence that arrives like a clean landing disguises the hours of bruised rehearsal behind it, and the disguise is the point.

Colton is also taking a swipe at two common misreadings of style. One is the Romantic myth that art is simply inspiration poured straight onto the page. The other is the modern confusion of opacity with profundity, the idea that hard-to-read must mean hard-won. His standard is almost athletic: the more formidable the feat, the more it should look effortless. That’s why the best prose feels inevitable, as if it couldn’t be otherwise, even when it’s been revised into submission.

The context matters. Writing in the early 19th century, Colton sits in a culture that prized polish, rhetoric, and public moralizing - an era of sermons, essays, and oratory where style carried authority. He’s diagnosing why certain voices command trust: ease reads as mastery, and mastery reads as truth. The subtext is slightly cynical but accurate: difficulty alone won’t earn love; the reader must be spared the sight of it. Admiration is not just for the work, but for the illusion that work never happened.