Charles Lamb quotes:

New Year's Day is every man's birthday.

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.

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

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

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

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?

The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking.

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

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.

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

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.

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

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.

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

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

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

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!

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

It is good to love the unknown.

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.

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

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.

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

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

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

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.

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

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

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!

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.

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.

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?

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.

The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

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

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

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print... substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.

Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?

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

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

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.

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood's years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken.

Man is a gaming animal.

Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die.

Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.

Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.

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.

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.

Mother's love grows by giving.

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.

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

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.

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

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!

(The pig) hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die.

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

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

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

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

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid

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

When twilight dews are falling soft Upon the rosy sea, love, I watch the star whose beam so oft Has lighted me to thee, love.

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength

Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.

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

For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die.

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

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.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

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

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

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

To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.

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

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.

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

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

And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

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

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.

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.

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

The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.

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.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

A Persian's heaven is eas'ly made: 'T is but black eyes and lemonade.

As half in shade and half in sun This world along its path advances, May that side the sun 's upon Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances!

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

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.

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

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!

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

Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.

Books which are no books.

Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.

A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.

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.

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

My only books Were woman's looks,- And folly 's all they 've taught me.