200 Quotes by Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb, an eminent English essayist and literary critic of the early 19th century, was a master of prose known for his unique and introspective style. Born in 1775, Lamb's contributions to literature were deeply influential, and his essays showcased a combination of wit, humor, and profound insight. One of his most remarkable works is "Essays of Elia," a collection of personal essays published under the pseudonym Elia, where he delved into various subjects, including life, literature, and the complexities of human nature.
Lamb's writing often displayed a compassionate understanding of human frailties, and he skillfully interwove personal experiences with literary analysis, making his work relatable to readers of all backgrounds. His essays transcended the boundaries of time and continue to be celebrated for their universal themes and timeless relevance. Charles Lamb's legacy as a critic lies not only in his literary prowess but also in his ability to touch the hearts of readers, leaving a lasting impact on the world of English literature.
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.
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 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?
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.
We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.
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.
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.
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
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.
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.
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!
A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.
Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.
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!
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
We encourage one another in mediocrity.
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.
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!
The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
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.
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.
To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.
The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
A Persian's heaven is eas'ly made: 'T is but black eyes and lemonade.
My only books Were woman's looks,- And folly 's all they 've taught me.
I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.
I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
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.
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
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.
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.
Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
Mother's love grows by giving.
The beggar wears all colors fearing none.
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
The world meets nobody half way.
Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.
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.
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
Man is a gaming animal.
My theory is to enjoy life, but my practice is against it.
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.
A babe is fed with milk and praise.
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 Muses were dumb while Apollo lectured.
Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold.
Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?
Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.
To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.
You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!
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.
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.
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.
He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.
It is good to have friends at court.
The true poet dreams being awake.
The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
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 garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.
His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.
Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.
Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.
We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one.
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.
Half as sober as a judge.
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
The vices of some men are magnificent.
Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me!
To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
Fly not yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.
Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress.
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?
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.
While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.
For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die.
Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.
English physicians kill you, the French let you die.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?
The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled. So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory's thrill is o'er; And hearts that once beat high for praise Now feel that pulse no more.
Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
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!
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.
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.
Take all the pleasures of all the spheres, And multiply each through endless years,- One minute of heaven is worth them all.
The light that lies In woman's eyes.
Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.
Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
You look wise, pray correct that error.
No work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself,--the most unwholesome of food.
May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the some on't.
Our spirits grow gray before our hairs.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
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!
Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!
The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.
Trample not on the ruins of a man.
Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.
I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.
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.
Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.
We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.
Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels.
Alas! how light a cause may move Dissension between hearts that love! Hearts that the world in vain had tried, And sorrow but more closely tied; That stood the storm when waves were rough, Yet in a sunny hour fall off, Like ships that have gone down at sea When heaven was all tranquillity.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
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.
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.
A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.
Presents, I often say, endear absents.
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!
There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.
Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.
Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."
No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.
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!
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.
It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.
We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.
She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.
Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.
And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.
All people have their blind side-their superstitions.
A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.
Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.
Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.
Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.
Oh stay! oh stay! Joy so seldom weaves a chain Like this to-night, that oh 't is pain To break its links so soon.
To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.
T is sweet to think that where we rove We are sure to find something blissful and dear; And that when we 're far from the lips we love, We 've but to make love to the lips we are near.
As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee. As still to the star of its worship, though clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee.
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.
The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling - a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
Books which are no books.
Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.
There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try!
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
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.
Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.
I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.
By myself walking, To myself talking.
Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.
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?
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.
Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new married couple; in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes for her.
Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
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.
A laxity pervades the popular use of words.
Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o'er sea or land we roam?
When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!
This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.
A presentation copy is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.
No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
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.
― Charles Lamb Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
