Charles Lamb Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

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

Charles Lamb
No work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself,--the most unwholesome of food.

Charles Lamb
We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.

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
Dream not... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!

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

Charles Lamb
Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

Charles Lamb
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Charles Lamb
Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?

Charles Lamb
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

Charles Lamb
So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.

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
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

Charles Lamb
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.

Charles Lamb
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.

Charles Lamb
An album is a garden, not for show
Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.

Charles Lamb
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

Charles Lamb
I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.

Charles Lamb
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Charles Lamb
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?

Charles Lamb
A flow'ret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in her cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying

Charles Lamb
How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?

Charles Lamb
Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species.

Charles Lamb
Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Charles Lamb