Charles Lamb Quotes - Page 6

Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

Since all the maids are good and lovable, from whence come the bad wives?

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.

I could never hate anyone I knew.

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!

I am in love with this green Earth.

His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.

Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."

Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.

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

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the some on't.

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.

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.

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

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

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene?

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

I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.