H.A. Lamb Quotes

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

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

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

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

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

The Muses were dumb while Apollo lectured.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

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

It is good to love the unknown.

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

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.

my mind is a world in itself, which I have peopled with my own creatures.

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

I wish you wouldn't walk in and out of my mind as though it was a railway station!

A babe is fed with milk and praise.

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

Her beauty was sold for an old man's gold. She's a bird in a gilded cage.

It's easier to fix damage than it is to create it.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

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

To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.

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

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

Half as sober as a judge.

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.

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.

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

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.

Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

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

You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!

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

It is good to have friends at court.

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

Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress.

My life has not been the best possible. The slave of impulse, I have rushed forward to my own destruction.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.

Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

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

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

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

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

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

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