Frank Moore Colby Quotes

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

I know of no more disagreeable sensation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.

We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Fill an author with a titanic fame and you do not make him titanic; you often merely burst him.

As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.

You cannot find, make or understand true friendship without having enemies.

The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.

When temptations march monotonously in regiments, one waits for to pass.

There ought to be some sign in a book about man, that the writer knows thoroughly one man at least.

Distaste sounds more emphatic when expressed as moral disapproval. With most of us the moral counterblast is nothing more than the angry rendering of a yawn.

Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.

The world is a play that would not be worth seeing if we knew the plot.

As crowds increase we build our forts of inattention, and the more we talk the easier it is to mean little and listen not at all.

Women singly do a good deal of harm. Women in bulk are chastening.

In middle life politics are not a mental acquisition; they are a temperament.

I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

Cast your cares on God that anchor holds.

That is the consolation of a little mind you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.