Charles Lamb Quotes & Sayings

#1. I am in love with the green earth.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#3. The vices of some men are magnificent.

Charles Lamb

#4. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.

Charles Lamb

#5. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#9. Half as sober as a judge.

Charles Lamb

#10. I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#12. The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#14. 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.

Charles Lamb

#15. Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.

Charles Lamb

#16. 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.

Charles Lamb

#17. It is good to have friends at court.

Charles Lamb

#18. Thus, when the lamp that lighted The traveller at first goes out, He feels awhile benighted, And looks around in fear and doubt. But soon, the prospect clearing, By cloudless starlight on he treads, And thinks no lamp so cheering As that light which Heaven sheds.

Charles Lamb

#19. O money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou are health and liberty and strength, and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!

Charles Lamb

#20. 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.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#22. It is good to love the unknown.

Charles Lamb

#23. He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#25. By myself walking, To myself talking.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#27. Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

Charles Lamb

#28. For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print ... substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#37. 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!

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#39. For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.

Charles Lamb

#40. Oh stay! oh stay! Joy so seldom weaves a chain Like this to-night, that oh 't is pain To break its links so soon.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#42. 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.

Charles Lamb

#43. Coleridge declares that a man cannot have a good conscience who refuses apple dumplings, and I confess that I am of the same opinion.

Charles Lamb

#44. Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#46. 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.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#48. 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!

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#51. Time partially reconciles us to anything.

Charles Lamb

#52. The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

Charles Lamb

#53. Mother's love grows by giving.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#56. There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

Charles Lamb

#57. I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

Charles Lamb

#58. Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#60. 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.

Charles Lamb

#61. A babe is fed with milk and praise.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#65. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

Charles Lamb

#66. I could never hate anyone I knew.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#70. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Charles Lamb

#71. We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.

Charles Lamb

#72. 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.

Charles Lamb

#73. and write as a boy and he

Charles Lamb

#74. 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.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#77. Of all sound of all bells ... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

Charles Lamb

#78. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

Charles Lamb

#79. 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?

Charles Lamb

#80. A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#82. I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

Charles Lamb

#83. 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.

Charles Lamb

#84. We encourage one another in mediocrity.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#86. A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.

Charles Lamb

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

Charles Lamb

#88. 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?

Charles Lamb

#89. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Charles Lamb

#90. The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling - a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.

Charles Lamb

#91. 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.

Charles Lamb

#92. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

Charles Lamb

#93. Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o'er sea or land we roam?

Charles Lamb

#94. I am accounted by some people as a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don't borrow money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb a congregation, etc., your business is done. I know things of myself, which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient.

Charles Lamb