"There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence"
About this Quote
Prudence is supposed to be the adult in the room; Colton’s neat little dagger is that it can also be the coward. “There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence” flips a virtue into a vice with one extra adjective, and the snap comes from the paradox: the very impulse meant to prevent harm can manufacture it. Colton isn’t praising recklessness so much as warning that risk-avoidance, taken as an identity, becomes its own kind of risk.
The intent is moral and social, not merely personal. In early 19th-century Britain, “prudence” carried the air of respectability: the posture of the careful bourgeois, the self-protective cleric, the politician who never quite commits. Colton, a clergyman-turned-aphorist with a taste for barbed observation, is needling the culture of timidity that hides behind good manners. Excessive prudence is procrastination dressed up as principle; it’s the alibi of people who want the moral credit of caution without paying the price of action.
The subtext is about opportunity costs. A life spent endlessly hedging can miss the moment when a decision is still available. Prudence becomes imprudence when it blocks the very learning, intimacy, and civic bravery that make a life durable. It also becomes a way to shift responsibility: if you never move, you never fail, and if you never fail, you never have to admit you wanted something.
Colton’s line works because it weaponizes common sense against itself. It’s not a romantic plea to “take chances,” but a cold reminder that safety, pursued fanatically, is just another gamble - one where the stakes are time, agency, and nerve.
The intent is moral and social, not merely personal. In early 19th-century Britain, “prudence” carried the air of respectability: the posture of the careful bourgeois, the self-protective cleric, the politician who never quite commits. Colton, a clergyman-turned-aphorist with a taste for barbed observation, is needling the culture of timidity that hides behind good manners. Excessive prudence is procrastination dressed up as principle; it’s the alibi of people who want the moral credit of caution without paying the price of action.
The subtext is about opportunity costs. A life spent endlessly hedging can miss the moment when a decision is still available. Prudence becomes imprudence when it blocks the very learning, intimacy, and civic bravery that make a life durable. It also becomes a way to shift responsibility: if you never move, you never fail, and if you never fail, you never have to admit you wanted something.
Colton’s line works because it weaponizes common sense against itself. It’s not a romantic plea to “take chances,” but a cold reminder that safety, pursued fanatically, is just another gamble - one where the stakes are time, agency, and nerve.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words (aphorism) — Charles Caleb Colton, 1820 (commonly cited source for this aphorism; exact page varies by edition) |
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