Charles Lamb > Quotes

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
― Charles Lamb, The life, letters and writings of Charles Lamb Volume 3

“I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.”
― Charles Lamb

“Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.”
― Charles Lamb

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
― Charles Lamb

“New Year's Day is every man's birthday.”
― Charles Lamb

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.”
― Charles Lamb

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

“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.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“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!”
― Charles Lamb

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

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading, I cannot sit and think. Books think for me”
― Charles Lamb

“My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.”
― Charles Lamb

“Contented with little yet wishing for more”
― Charles Lamb

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

“There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.”
― Charles Lamb

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own - 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.”
― Charles Lamb, The Superannuated Man

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

“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.”
― Charles Lamb

“I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library”
― Charles Lamb

“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.”
― Charles Lamb, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820

“My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies, and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages, and, like a better man than myself, have 'small Latin and less Greek'. I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers - not from the circumstance of my being town-born - for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it, 'on Devon's leafy shores' - and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tool, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance - but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious, and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, 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. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me.”
― Charles Lamb

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds”
― Charles Lamb

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and irony itself-- do these things go out with life? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?”
― Charles Lamb

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading.”
― Charles Lamb

“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?”
― Charles Lamb, Poems, Plays And Miscellaneous Essays.

“Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest?”
― Charles Lamb

“Time partially reconciles us to anything.”
― Charles Lamb

“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.”
― Charles Lamb