Charles Lamb Men Quotations

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.

It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

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.

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!

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.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I am accounted by some people as a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don't borrow money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb a congregation, etc., your business is done. I know things of myself, which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient.

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

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

A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.

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

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

The only true time which a man can properly call his own, is 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.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.

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

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

Man is a gaming animal.

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.

Dr Parr...asked him, how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.'

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

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

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?"

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?

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

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

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

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.