Charles Lamb Quotes

Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son - when four of them started up at once to inform me, that 'that was impossible, because he was dead.' An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.

I have something more to do than to feel.

When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.

The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.

You look wise, pray correct that error.

There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

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.

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same ... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

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.

Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Half as sober as a judge.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try!

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?

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.

I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold.

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.

Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me!

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!

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own
that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.

The light that lies In woman's eyes.

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

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

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

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

'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'
... The inventor of [this saying] did not believe it himself ... Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck - however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

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

Since all the maids are good and lovable, from whence come the bad wives?

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

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

The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

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

English physicians kill you, the French let you die.

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

Those evening bells! those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells Of youth and home, and that sweet time When last I heard their soothing chime!

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

Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."

Oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence.

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarc

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.

By myself walking, To myself talking.

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

New Year's Day is every man's birthday.

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

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

I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

The English writer, Charles Lamb, said one day: "I hate that man." "But you don't know him." "Of course, I don't," said Lamb. "Do you think I could possibly hate a man I know?"

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.

The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.

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

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

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

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

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.

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

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

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

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life.

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.

Not if I know myself at all.

I even think that, sentimentally, I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune.

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

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.

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

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.

I give thee all,-I can no more, Though poor the off'ring be; My heart and lute are all the store That I can bring to thee.

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.

This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, Theres nothing true but Heaven.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.

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.

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood's years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken.

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.

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee. As still to the star of its worship, though clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee.

A sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature.

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.

Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest?

It is good to love the unknown.