Top 200 Charles Lamb Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “I’d like to grow very old as slowly as possible.”

— Charles Lamb

152. “Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?”

— Charles Lamb

153. “English physicians kill you, the French let you die.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

155. “I mean your borrowers of books – those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.”

— Charles Lamb

156. “I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

158. “Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

160. “Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

162. “In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

164. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

165. “Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

167. “What is reading, but silent conversation.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

169. “This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.”

— Charles Lamb

170. “All people have their blind side-their superstitions.”

— Charles Lamb

171. “An album is a garden, not for show Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.”

— Charles Lamb

172. “Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

174. “No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.”

— Charles Lamb

175. “Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews’s Sermons?”

— Charles Lamb

176. “Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

178. “Trample not on the ruins of a man.”

— Charles Lamb

179. “Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.”

— Charles Lamb

180. “The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.”

— Charles Lamb

181. “Not if I know myself at all.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

184. “I cannot sit and think; books think for me.”

— Charles Lamb

185. “He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.”

— Charles Lamb

186. “Books which are no books.”

— Charles Lamb

187. “I have something more to do than to feel.”

— Charles Lamb

188. “There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.”

— Charles Lamb

189. “Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?”

— Charles Lamb

190. “No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.”

— Charles Lamb

191. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

192. “I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.”

— Charles Lamb

193. “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.”

— Charles Lamb

194. “The cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard, Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims Tidings of good to Zion.”

— Charles Lamb

195. “Oh stay! oh stay! Joy so seldom weaves a chain Like this to-night, that oh ’t is pain To break its links so soon.”

— Charles Lamb

196. “It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.”

— Charles Lamb

197. “In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

199. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb