Charles Lamb Quotes

Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations.

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Contented with little yet wishing for more

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

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

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

For I hate, yet love thee, so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrained hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.

'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'
...The inventor of [this saying] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.

Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet of a great family ; some neglected lump of nobility ; or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favourite watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

Put away from you this unfounded grief; only let it be a lesson to you to be as kind as possible to those you love; and remember, when they are gone from you, you will never think you had been kind enough.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading, I cannot sit and think. Books think for me

Adriana had so well profited by the good counsel of her mother-in-law, that she never after cherished unjust suspicions, or was jealous of her husband.[Pg 189]

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!