Charles Lamb famous quotes

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.
-- Charles Lamb

#Sports #War #Squash

My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.
-- Charles Lamb

#Wish #Littles #Anticipation

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.
-- Charles Lamb

#Funny Inspirational #Spring #World

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.
-- Charles Lamb

#Funny #Hilarious #Witty

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
-- Charles Lamb

#Dog #Book #Reading

I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Smoking #Toil

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
-- Charles Lamb

#Children #Law #Political

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
-- Charles Lamb

#New Year #Firsts #Common

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.
-- Charles Lamb

#New Year #Holiday #Years

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Self #Dimensions

Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.
-- Charles Lamb

#Attitude #Hate #Men

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Men #Thinking

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Race #Two

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Mean #Odd

The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Likes #Wells

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
-- Charles Lamb

#Laughter #Laughing #Hundred

May my last breath be drawn through a pipe, and exhaled in a jest.
-- Charles Lamb

#Smoking #May #Lasts

I hate the man who eats without knowing what he’s eating. I doubt his taste in more important things.
-- Charles Lamb

#Hate #Men #Knowing

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.
-- Charles Lamb

#Hair #Long #Age

Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.
-- Charles Lamb

#Life #Pain #Evidence

Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?
-- Charles Lamb

#Destiny #Errands #Riddle

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.
-- Charles Lamb

#Character #Charity #Action

I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
-- Charles Lamb

#School #Childhood #Gone

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Mediocrity #Association

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
-- Charles Lamb

#Animal #Men #Trying

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
-- Charles Lamb

#Beauty #Reality

So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Littles #Sin

Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.
-- Charles Lamb

#Daughter #Farewell #Dark

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.
-- Charles Lamb

#Flower #Sea #Wish

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Next #Good Work

Half as sober as a judge.
-- Charles Lamb

#Judging #Half #Sober

You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!
-- Charles Lamb

#Play #Age #Cards

How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
-- Charles Lamb

#Taken #Departed #Gone

The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
-- Charles Lamb

#Fancy

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!
-- Charles Lamb

#Distance #Doors #Sublime

Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!
-- Charles Lamb

#Dream #Mad #Gone

It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Good Man #Doe

Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species.
-- Charles Lamb

#Spurs #Might #Kind

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.
-- Charles Lamb

#Use

Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
-- Charles Lamb

#Character #Nerves #Wit

We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.
-- Charles Lamb

#Sight #Shy #Monkeys

I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.
-- Charles Lamb

#Sweet #Children #Bears

Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.
-- Charles Lamb

#Strong #Drinking #Men

It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.
-- Charles Lamb

#Character #Imagination #Mind

The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.
-- Charles Lamb

#Friends #Party #Going Away

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings.
-- Charles Lamb

#Prejudice #Bundles #Made

The true poet dreams being awake.
-- Charles Lamb

#Dream #Poetry #Poet

We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one.
-- Charles Lamb

#Taste #Remember #Ancient

Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.
-- Charles Lamb

#Opinion #Species #Property

Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.
-- Charles Lamb

#Pockets #Painful #Deny

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Childhood #Youth

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.
-- Charles Lamb

#Time #Firsts #January

For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
-- Charles Lamb

#Body #Sometimes #Speak

(The pig) hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die.
-- Charles Lamb

#Grateful #Pigs #Might

Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
-- Charles Lamb

#Mind #Body #Absence

My only books Were woman's looks,- And folly 's all they 've taught me.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Looks #Taught

As half in shade and half in sun This world along its path advances, May that side the sun 's upon Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances!
-- Charles Lamb

#Half #World #May

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
-- Charles Lamb

#Sweet #Water #Valleys

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
-- Charles Lamb

#Apples #Soul #Library

The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling - a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
-- Charles Lamb

#Glasses #Imagination #Quality

Presents, I often say, endear absents.
-- Charles Lamb

Books which are no books.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book

A Persian's heaven is eas'ly made: 'T is but black eyes and lemonade.
-- Charles Lamb

#Eye #Heaven #Black

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.
-- Charles Lamb

#Eye #Heaven #Watches

Take all the pleasures of all the spheres, And multiply each through endless years,- One minute of heaven is worth them all.
-- Charles Lamb

#Years #Heaven #Spheres

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Reading #Originality

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
-- Charles Lamb

#Society #Ornaments #Might

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.
-- Charles Lamb

#Thinking #May #Way

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.
-- Charles Lamb

#People #Sides #Superstitions

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?
-- Charles Lamb

#Eye #Men #Space

The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.
-- Charles Lamb

#Doe #Tease #Trumpets

I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.
-- Charles Lamb

#Retirement #Garden #Gestures

A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Favour #Doe

Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.
-- Charles Lamb

#Literature #Sticks #Crutches

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!
-- Charles Lamb

I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.
-- Charles Lamb

#Hate #Men #Matter

Coleridge declares that a man cannot have a good conscience who refuses apple dumplings, and I confess that I am of the same opinion.
-- Charles Lamb

#Men #Apples #Opinion

Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.
-- Charles Lamb

#Education #Teacher #Teaching

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.
-- Charles Lamb

#Children #Pride #People

He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.
-- Charles Lamb

#Perfection #Mixtures #Matter

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
-- Charles Lamb

#Trying #Despair #Scottish

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.
-- Charles Lamb

#Dream #Names #Waiting

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.
-- Charles Lamb

#Dresses #Female #Poverty

A babe is fed with milk and praise.
-- Charles Lamb

#Childhood #Milk #Praise

Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels.
-- Charles Lamb

#Angel #Giving #Water

Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Thinking #I Can Read

How often you are irresistibly drawn to a plain, unassuming woman, whose soft silvery tones render her positively attractive! In the social circle, how pleasant it is to hear a woman talk in that low key which always characterizes the true lady. In the sanctuary of home, how such a voice soothes the fretful child and cheers the weary husband!
-- Charles Lamb

#Cheer #Children #Husband

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?
-- Charles Lamb

#Queens #Reading #Book

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.
-- Charles Lamb

#Reading #Needs #Ears

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
-- Charles Lamb

#Book #Reading #Thinking

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.
-- Charles Lamb

#Rags #Dresses #Poverty

An album is a garden, not for show Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.
-- Charles Lamb

#Garden #Albums #Use

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
-- Charles Lamb

#Garden #Poetry #Simplicity

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them.
-- Charles Lamb

#Faith #Mistake #Dark

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.
-- Charles Lamb

#Tombstone #Ordinary #Disgusting

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.
-- Charles Lamb

#Tombstone #Doe #Looks

It is good to have friends at court.
-- Charles Lamb

#Friends #Court

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.
-- Charles Lamb

#Attachment #Done #London

A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood, Was in her cradle-coffin lying; Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying
-- Charles Lamb

#Lying #Dying #Coffins

Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?
-- Charles Lamb

#Acting #Bears #Excited