Charles Lamb Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

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

Charles Lamb
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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

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

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
Nay, rather,
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.

Charles Lamb
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.

Charles Lamb
Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
.........
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
.........
Sabbath-less Satan!

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

Charles Lamb
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
In heav'n, the saint nor pity feels, nor care,
For those thus sentenced - pity might disturb
The delicate sense and most divine repose
Of spiritus angelical
Blessed be God,
The measure of his judgments is not fixed
By man's erroneous standard. He discerns
No such inordinate difference and vast
Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom
Such disproportion'd fates.
Compared with him,
No man on earth is holy called: they best
Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet
Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield,
To him of his own works the praise, his due.

Charles Lamb
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

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

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

Charles Lamb
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

Charles Lamb
Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple.

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

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
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.

Charles Lamb
We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.

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

Charles Lamb