Charles lamb quotes

Who first invented work, and bound the free And holiday-rejoicing spirit down . . . . To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? . . . . Sabbathless Satan!

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.

To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.

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

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 man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

Man is a gaming animal.

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

The true poet dreams being awake.

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

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.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

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.

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.

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Trample not on the ruins of a man.

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.

He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

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.

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.

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

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

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

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.

It is good to have friends at court.

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.

English physicians kill you, the French let you die.

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

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

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

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

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!

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.

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

When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.

The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings.

I am accounted by some people as a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don't borrow money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb a congregation, etc., your business is done. I know things of myself, which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient.

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.

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

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

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 encourage one another in mediocrity.

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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

The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.

I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.

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

If thou would'st have me sing and play As once I play'd and sung, First take this time-worn lute away, And bring one freshly strung.

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

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.

You look wise, pray correct that error.

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

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.

Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

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

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

The world meets nobody half way.

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

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

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.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

I hate the man who eats without knowing what he’s eating. I doubt his taste in more important things.

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.

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.

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

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

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

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

It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.

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?

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

I ask and wish not to appear More beauteous, rich or gay: Lord, make me wiser every year, And better every day.

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

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.

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

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.

We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

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

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

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.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.

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.

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.

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

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.

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

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

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.

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!

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

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

A sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature.

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.

I am in love with the green earth.

Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.

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.

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

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