Charles Lamb Quotes

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

For thy sake tobacco I Would do anything but die.

We all have some taste or other of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering that it was an acquired one.

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.

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

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

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

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

There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature ... is perhaps cowardice.

I have sat through an Italian opera til for sheer pain and inexplicable anguish I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless fruitless barren attention!

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.... Books think for me.

Books think for me.

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

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

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

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

The only true time which a man can properly call his own is that which he has all to himself the rest though in some sense he may be said to live it is other people's time not his.

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.

Man is a gaming animal.

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

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.

Neat not gaudy.

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.

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

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

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

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

If dirt was trumps what hands you would hold!

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.