Top 200 Charles Lamb Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

53. “Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see another mountain in my life.”

— Charles Lamb

54. “The beggar wears all colors fearing none.”

— Charles Lamb

55. “I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.”

— Charles Lamb

56. “Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!”

— Charles Lamb

57. “Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.”

— Charles Lamb

58. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

59. “Presents, I often say, endear absents.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

61. “I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices – made up of likings and dislikings.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

63. “I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

65. “Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.”

— Charles Lamb

66. “I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition ’s shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.”

— Charles Lamb

67. “I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.”

— Charles Lamb

68. “Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.”

— Charles Lamb

69. “The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.”

— Charles Lamb

70. “To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.”

— Charles Lamb

71. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

72. “I even think that, sentimentally, I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune.”

— Charles Lamb

73. “I could never hate anyone I knew.”

— Charles Lamb

74. “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!”

— Charles Lamb

75. “The light that lies In woman’s eyes.”

— Charles Lamb

76. “Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content – doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.”

— Charles Lamb

77. “Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father’s dwelling?”

— Charles Lamb

78. “Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.”

— Charles Lamb

79. “Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.”

— Charles Lamb

80. “Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.”

— Charles Lamb

81. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

82. “Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?”

— Charles Lamb

83. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

84. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

85. “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?”

— Charles Lamb

86. “No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.”

— Charles Lamb

87. “When twilight dews are falling soft Upon the rosy sea, love, I watch the star whose beam so oft Has lighted me to thee, love.”

— Charles Lamb

88. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

89. “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?”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

91. “A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

95. “If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!”

— Charles Lamb

96. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

97. “The English writer, Charles Lamb, said one day: “I hate that man.” “But you don’t know him.” “Of course, I don’t,” said Lamb. “Do you think I could possibly hate a man I know?””

— Charles Lamb

98. “Brandy and water spoils two good things.”

— Charles Lamb

99. “Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.”

— Charles Lamb

100. “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.”

— Charles Lamb