Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Lamb Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Lamb.

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Famous Quotes By Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1632754

It is good to have friends at court. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 481706

The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1720482

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 638021

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 777696

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 744776

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene? — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2239217

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. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2024705

As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee. As still to the star of its worship, though clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1299057

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1666080

I ask and wish not to appear
More beauteous, rich or gay:
Lord, make me wiser every year,
And better every day. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1543078

I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1895104

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1168563

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 758228

It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man
as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1629491

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1615081

Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 517932

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1635176

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1205503

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 812204

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1698185

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history! — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1409842

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 988003

Presents, I often say, endear absents. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 690293

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1475677

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 876675

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1305971

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same ... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1598232

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1490708

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1571643

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1544305

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1246723

Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1414994

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1356852

We encourage one another in mediocrity. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1350330

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1328942

Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me! — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2251378

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 2023339

The world meets nobody half way. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 103525

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2230100

Trample not on the ruins of a man. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2216812

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 2194231

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 2190260

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2186354

Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2150449

It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 2075931

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 2073929

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1622010

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1979785

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1884926

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1840817

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1827431

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons? — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1819063

'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'
... The inventor of [this saying] did not believe it himself ... Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck - however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1778135

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1668645

All people have their blind side-their superstitions. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1646828

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk! — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 497659

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 762789

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 757810

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 747259

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 719929

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 713803

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 681378

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 654974

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 645909

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 639532

Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 596714

Time partially reconciles us to anything. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 848583

We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 269740

Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 260591

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 256665

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance! — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 256045

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. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 231658

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 210608

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. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 203608

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 202315

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 168099

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 112246

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1001962

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1232703

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1206626

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1187643

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1173919

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1157494

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1149880

Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1143340

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself! — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1058579

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1037805

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 1026066

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 1238712

Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 986926

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 984002

May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the some on't. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 951427

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 947675

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 935072

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 932971

I could never hate anyone I knew. — Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb Quotes 919257

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 893296

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 884924

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

Charles Lamb Quotes 862667

A laxity pervades the popular use of words. — Charles Lamb