Charles Lamb Quotes

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.

Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Not if I know myself at all.

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.

By myself walking, To myself talking.

Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.

Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?

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

No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

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

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.

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

There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.

We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.

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

Books think for me.

If dirt was trumps what hands you would hold!

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature ... is perhaps cowardice.

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

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

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

Neat not gaudy.

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

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.

For thy sake tobacco I Would do anything but die.

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

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