Quote #22

How small a portion of our life is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that have gone past. In things that are present, even that is too often absorbed in vague determination to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.

More from Charles Caleb Colton

  1. Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible
  2. If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defense of it by its friends.
  3. He that likes a hot dinner, a warm welcome, new ideas and old wine, will not often dine with the great.
  4. If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth but, if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. We shall find it is less dif…
  5. He that has never suffered adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself. Constant success shows us but one side of the wor…
  6. If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one, until it be in your power to remunerate all; other…
  7. Habit will reconcile us to everything but change.
  8. In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

All Charles Caleb Colton quotes