Charles Lamb Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

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

Charles Lamb
I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

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

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

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 poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

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

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

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

Charles Lamb
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how kinglike he sways his pillow-tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and molding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.

Charles Lamb
You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

Charles Lamb
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!

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
Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

Charles Lamb
The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

Charles Lamb
Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?

Charles Lamb
How often you are irresistibly drawn to a plain, unassuming woman, whose soft silvery tones render her positively attractive! In the social circle, how pleasant it is to hear a woman talk in that low key which always characterizes the true lady. In the sanctuary of home, how such a voice soothes the fretful child and cheers the weary husband!

Charles Lamb
The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones.

Charles Lamb