Charles Lamb Quotes

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

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

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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.

Mother's love grows by giving.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 cannot sit and think; books think for me.

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

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

Man is a gaming animal.

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

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

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

The world meets nobody half way.

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.

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

It is good to love the unknown.

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

The Muses were dumb while Apollo lectured.

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

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

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

A babe is fed with milk and praise.

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

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

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

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

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

Half as sober as a judge.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature?but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind.

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

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

For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die.

Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

Fly not yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.