The sentence is a numbered aphorism in Colton’s Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words, Volume I of which was first published in 1820. The wording that circulates today is exact — it appears verbatim in the scanned New York printing of 1824 (“from the eighth London edition”) and again in the 1836 New York edition. Edmund Burke died in 1797, before Lacon existed.
“Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones” Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones. — Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words, Vol. I (first published 1820). Commonly misattributed to Edmund Burke.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Edmund Burke. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words: Addressed to Those Who Think
Author
Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832)
First published
Volume I, 1820 (Volume II, 1822)
Text verified in
New York: S. Marks, 1824, “from the eighth London edition” — aphorism CCCCXXIII, p. 181
Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
Lacon, Vol. I
Lacon is a book of free-standing numbered aphorisms, so there is no larger passage to quote — the sentence is the whole entry. In the 1824 printing it sits between Colton’s reflection on public charities and his remark that “in most quarrels there is a fault on both sides.”
Start with the specialists. Wikiquote’s Applause page ↗ carries the sentence and credits it to Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon (1820) — not to Burke. Quote Investigator has no article on this line.
Check a second printing. The 1836 New York edition ↗ has the identical wording in the identical position, between the passages on public charities and on quarrels — so this is Colton’s text, not a printer’s stray.
✓Public domain
Lacon, Volume I was first published in 1820, and the printings consulted here date from 1824 and 1836 — all long past any US copyright term. The text is freely reproducible; no translation is involved, since Colton wrote in English.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How Burke got the credit
Search the line today and Edmund Burke’s name comes back first. No edition of Burke contains it, and no quotation site crediting him offers a work, speech or page — the attribution travels on repetition alone.
Lacon was built to be quoted. Colton wrote in short, numbered, self-contained hits — hundreds of them — with no argument running between them, which made the book perfect raw material for the Victorian anthologies that came after. That is a blessing for circulation and a curse for provenance: once a sentence is lifted out of a numbered list, nothing about it says who wrote it.
Edmund Burke is the kind of name such orphaned lines land on. He is famous, quotable, and already carries more attributed aphorisms than he ever wrote — so a crisp epigram about applause and weak minds slots in without anyone blinking. The tell is the calendar: Burke died in 1797, and Lacon’s first volume did not appear until 1820.
Colton wrote to be excerpted — which is exactly how his name got left behind.
A note on the aphorism number
Colton’s aphorisms are numbered in Roman numerals, and the numbering is not identical across editions and reprints. In the 1824 New York printing consulted here the sentence stands as CCCCXXIII on p. 181; Wikiquote’s Colton page and the WIST quotation database both file it as Volume I, § CCCCXXIV (424). The text either side of it — the passage on public charities before, the passage on quarrels after — is the same in every printing checked, so the sentence’s position in the book is not in doubt.
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Filed under
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Charles Caleb Colton was an English clergyman and writer whose one enduring book, Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words, is a collection of numbered aphorisms — Volume I appeared in 1820, Volume II in 1822. He was known as much for his eccentricity as his prose: a wine dealer, gambler and collector who eventually left England for Paris. His own works are now almost forgotten, and he survives mainly through quotation anthologies — which is precisely how his lines end up drifting onto other people’s names.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words: Addressed to Those Who Think, vol. 1 (first published 1820). Wording verified in the New York printing “from the eighth London edition” (New York: S. Marks, 1824), aphorism CCCCXXIII, p. 181, and in the New York edition of 1836 (C. Wells).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones’?” Last verified 3 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/applause-is-the-spur-of-noble-minds-the-end-and-aim-of-weak/