Charles Lamb Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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

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

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

Charles Lamb
Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

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
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

Charles Lamb
Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.

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
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.

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
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
Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him.

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

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

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
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

Charles Lamb
The cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard, Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims Tidings of good to Zion.

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

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

Charles Lamb
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

Charles Lamb
If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.

Charles Lamb
[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.

Charles Lamb
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.

Charles Lamb
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

Charles Lamb
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