Charles Lamb Quotes

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

If thou would'st have me sing and play As once I play'd and sung, First take this time-worn lute away, And bring one freshly strung.

When true hearts lie wither'd And fond ones are flown, Oh, who would inhabit This bleak world alone?

Mother's love grows by giving.

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

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

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

Time partially reconciles us to anything.

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

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.

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.

I give thee all,-I can no more, Though poor the off'ring be; My heart and lute are all the store That I can bring to thee.

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

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?

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

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

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.

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.

The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?

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

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

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

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

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

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

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

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

Half as sober as a judge.

Man is a gaming animal.

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

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

There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try!

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

Since all the maids are good and lovable, from whence come the bad wives?

When twilight dews are falling soft Upon the rosy sea, love, I watch the star whose beam so oft Has lighted me to thee, love.

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

When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.

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

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

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

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

I am in love with this green Earth.

Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.

If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!

By myself walking, To myself talking.

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

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.

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

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

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.

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

Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!

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

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

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

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?

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

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

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

A sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature.

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

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid

Not if I know myself at all.

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

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.

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

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.

I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.

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

The world meets nobody half way.

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps - good works.

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

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.
We are only what might have been ...

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

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.

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.

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

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

Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.

Oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence.

Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

It is good to have friends at court.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

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

The vices of some men are magnificent.