Top 200 Charles Lamb Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

154. “She unbent her mind afterwards – over a book.”

— Charles Lamb

155. “Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o’er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o’er sea or land we roam?”

— Charles Lamb

156. “Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.”

— Charles Lamb

157. “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

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. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.”

— Charles Lamb

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

172. “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

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

— Charles Lamb

174. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Charles Lamb

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

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

180. “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

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

184. “A laxity pervades the popular use of words.”

— Charles Lamb

185. “Not if I know myself at all.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

190. “Books which are no books.”

— Charles Lamb

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

— Charles Lamb

Featured in: Reading Quotes

192. “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

193. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Charles Lamb

195. “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

196. “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

197. “We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one.”

— Charles Lamb

198. “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

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

— Charles Lamb

200. “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