The vices of some men are magnificent.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Vice, Virtue
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: The Universe
My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Contentment
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see another mountain in my life.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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
Topics: Acting
Ballads are the vocal portraits of the national mind.
—Charles Lamb
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Law, Lawyers
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
Borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Reading, Books, Libraries
Pain is life—the sharper, the more evidence of life.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Pain
Lawyers I suppose were children once.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Lawyers, Law
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Books, Reading
How a sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated in him as his only duty.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Health, Cancer, Selfishness
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Children
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
Topics: Books
We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Age
Man while he loves is never quite depraved.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Love
Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Home
Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric. Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar.
—Charles Lamb
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Jews
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
Topics: Attitude
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Laughter
In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Scientists, Science
Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Gambling, Competition
For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print… substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Reputation
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Life
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Libraries
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Riches, Time Management, Wealth, Value of a Day
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
—Charles Lamb
What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by moderate meals? A total blank.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Health
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Keats English Poet
- Daniel Defoe English Writer
- John Donne English Poet, Cleric
- Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie English Novelist, Biographer
- Geoffrey Chaucer English Poet
- Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
- J. K. Rowling English Novelist
- Walter Pater English Critic, Essayist
- Thomas Hood British Poet, Humorist
- Stephen Spender English Poet, Critic
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