Charles Lamb Quotations

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

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

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

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

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

I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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

Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.

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

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.

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.

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.

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.

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

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

No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him.

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.

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.

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

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!

His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

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

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.

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

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

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.

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

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

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.

A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.

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

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

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.

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

The vices of some men are magnificent.

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!

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

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.

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.

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

Books which are no books.

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

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

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

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?

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.

May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the some on't.

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

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

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

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

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

I am in love with this green Earth.

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

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.

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

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!

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.

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.

To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

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

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

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.

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

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.

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?

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

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

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.

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

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

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.