Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line flatters the reader’s common sense while quietly skewering the era’s two favorite self-deceptions: virtuous poverty and glamorous excess. The shoe metaphor is doing more than decorating a moral lesson; it smuggles in a practical view of money that refuses romance. “Too small” isn’t ennobling, it’s physically painful. Need isn’t a character-building fable, it’s a daily abrasion that “galls and pinches” until the wearer can’t think straight. Colton gives deprivation the language of the body, not the pulpit.

Then he turns the knife on the other side. “Too large” sounds like a blessing until he makes it clumsy. Oversized income doesn’t simply corrupt you; it destabilizes you. You “stumble and trip” because abundance introduces new frictions: waste, distraction, obligation, the soft tyranny of maintaining a lifestyle you didn’t need five minutes ago. The subtext is almost modern: money, like clothing, is a tool for moving through the world. Misfit turns it into an impediment.

Context matters. Colton wrote in a Britain wrestling with industrial wealth, rising consumer culture, and sharpening class lines. In that atmosphere, a neat proverb about “enough” doubles as social criticism. He isn’t preaching asceticism; he’s arguing for proportion. The ideal is fit: an income that matches your life, your responsibilities, your temperament. Anything else, whether scarcity or surplus, warps your stride.