Charles Lamb Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Lamb.
Famous Quotes By Charles Lamb
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
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice. — Charles Lamb
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
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
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
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
Oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence. — Charles Lamb
I ask and wish not to appear
More beauteous, rich or gay:
Lord, make me wiser every year,
And better every day. — Charles Lamb
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
There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine. — Charles Lamb
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. — Charles Lamb
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
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
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
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
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
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. — Charles Lamb
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
Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad. — Charles Lamb
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
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
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. — Charles Lamb
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it. — Charles Lamb
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. — Charles Lamb
She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book. — Charles Lamb
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
What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank. — Charles Lamb
We encourage one another in mediocrity. — Charles Lamb
When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think. — Charles Lamb
Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me! — Charles Lamb
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
The world meets nobody half way. — Charles Lamb
When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power. — Charles Lamb
Trample not on the ruins of a man. — Charles Lamb
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
Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book. — Charles Lamb
Cards are war, in disguise of a sport. — Charles Lamb
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
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
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
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
There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host. — Charles Lamb
Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less. — Charles Lamb
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
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
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
'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
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. — Charles Lamb
All people have their blind side-their superstitions. — Charles Lamb
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
Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other. — Charles Lamb
Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity. — Charles Lamb
He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. — Charles Lamb
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society. — Charles Lamb
In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. — Charles Lamb
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them. — Charles Lamb
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation. — Charles Lamb
There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet. — Charles Lamb
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. — Charles Lamb
Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing. — Charles Lamb
Time partially reconciles us to anything. — Charles Lamb
We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger. — Charles Lamb
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
Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever. — Charles Lamb
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
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
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
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
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
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
There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try! — Charles Lamb
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord. — Charles Lamb
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
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market. — Charles Lamb
No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us. — Charles Lamb
Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. — Charles Lamb
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
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling? — Charles Lamb
Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded. — Charles Lamb
How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself! — Charles Lamb
And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon. — Charles Lamb
I hate the man who eats without knowing what he's eating. I doubt his taste in more important things. — Charles Lamb
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
Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home. — Charles Lamb
You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself! — Charles Lamb
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
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. — Charles Lamb
Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved. — Charles Lamb
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides. — Charles Lamb
I could never hate anyone I knew. — Charles Lamb
I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus. — Charles Lamb
Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold. — Charles Lamb
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
A laxity pervades the popular use of words. — Charles Lamb