Charles Lamb Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.

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

Charles Lamb
Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.

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

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

Charles Lamb
Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites. For my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, nor for Handel.

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
The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

Charles Lamb
May my last breath be drawn through a pipe, and exhaled in a jest.

Charles Lamb
Severe and saintly righteousness
Composed the clear white bridal dress;
Jesus, the Son of Heaven's high King
Bought with his blood the marriage ring

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.

Charles Lamb
Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

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

Charles Lamb
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Lamb
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
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Charles Lamb
Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

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

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

Charles Lamb