Charles Lamb QUOTES

1 " I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early. "

2 " I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me. "

― Charles Lamb

3 " Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected. "

― Charles Lamb , The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb Volume 3

4 " 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

5 " There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine. "

― Charles Lamb

6 " Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. "

― Charles Lamb

7 " 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

8 " Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling? "

― Charles Lamb , Poems, Plays And Miscellaneous Essays Of Charles Lamb

9 " Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart. "

― Charles Lamb , The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820 (The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb - Volume 5)

10 " 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

11 " The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. "

― Charles Lamb

12 " New Year's Day is every man's birthday. "

― Charles Lamb

13 " Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. "

― Charles Lamb , Essays of Elia

14 " I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his com position. "

― Charles Lamb , Essays of Elia

15 " Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that ‘that was impossible, because he was dead.’ An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. "

― Charles Lamb , Essays of Elia

16 " [Re: Valentine's Day cards] On these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, — that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the bestuck and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal," or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff' to bestow?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. "

― Charles Lamb , Essays of Elia

17 " Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. "

― Charles Lamb

18 " Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. "

― Charles Lamb , Essays of Elia

19 " The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. "

― Charles Lamb

20 " 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

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