Best 235 quotes of Charles Lamb on MyQuotes

A babe is fed with milk and praise.

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.

A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.

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

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

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

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.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

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 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.

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!

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

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

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

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

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

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 poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch 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.

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.

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.

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!

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.

A sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature.

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.

Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

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.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

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

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

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

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?

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

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.

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

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

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.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

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.

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

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

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

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.

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

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

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