66 Charles Lamb Quotes

Charles Lamb quotes

1. I have something more to do than to feel.

2. 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.

3. For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

4. Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.

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

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

7. Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?

8. Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.

9. For thy sake, Tobacco, I Would do anything but die.

10. A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.

11. Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

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

13. [Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.

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

15. Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.

16. Who first invented work, and bound the free And holyday-rejoicing spirit down?

17. I came home for ever!

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

19. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'

20. Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart, Just as the whim bites. For my part, I do not care a farthing candle For either of them, nor for Handel.

21. 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?

22. He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

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

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

25. 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.

26. Your borrowers of books-those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

27. 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!

28. A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.

29. I have no ear.

30. Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

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

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

33. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

34. It is good to love the unknown.

35. Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

36. Presents, I often say, endear absents.

37. A poor relation-is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

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

39. Books think for me.

40. Things in books' clothing.

41. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.

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

43. A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

44. A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.

45. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.

46. The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water.

1. 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.

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

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

4. To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.

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

6. Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

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

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

9. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

10. Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new married couple; in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes for her.

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

12. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

13. 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!

14. Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

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

16. 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.

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

18. 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.

19. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.

20. I ask and wish not to appear More beauteous, rich or gay: Lord, make me wiser every year, And better every day.