Charles Lamb Quotes - Page 7

Half as sober as a judge.

If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

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.

All people have their blind side-their superstitions.

Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!

The English writer, Charles Lamb, said one day: "I hate that man." "But you don't know him." "Of course, I don't," said Lamb. "Do you think I could possibly hate a man I know?"

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.

To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

'T is sweet to think that where'er we rove We are sure to find something blissful and dear; And that when we 're far from the lips we love, We 've but to make love to the lips we are near.

Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me!

Our spirits grow gray before our hairs.

Fly not yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.

Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new married couple; in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes for her.

Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold.

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.