Charles Lamb Quotes

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

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

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

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.

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

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?

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

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

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

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.

I am in love with this green Earth.

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Those evening bells! those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells Of youth and home, and that sweet time When last I heard their soothing chime!

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.

This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, Theres nothing true but Heaven.

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

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

A sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature.

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

Coleridge declares that a man cannot have a good conscience who refuses apple dumplings, and I confess that I am of the same opinion.

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.

Dr Parr...asked him, how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.'

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

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.

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

I am in love with the green earth.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

Shall I ask the brave soldier who fights by my side In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?

Thus, when the lamp that lighted The traveller at first goes out, He feels awhile benighted, And looks around in fear and doubt. But soon, the prospect clearing, By cloudless starlight on he treads, And thinks no lamp so cheering As that light which Heaven sheds.

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.

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them.