Charles Lamb > Quotes

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

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
― Charles Lamb, The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb

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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

“Dream not...of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.”
― 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

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

“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!”
― Charles Lamb