Charles Lamb Quotes - Page 4

Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life.

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

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?

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.

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

Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.

No work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself,--the most unwholesome of food.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

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.

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.

The true poet dreams being awake.

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

My theory is to enjoy life, but my practice is against it.

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.

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

It is good to have friends at court.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.

Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels.

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?

Man is a gaming animal.

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

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.

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.