Charles Lamb Quotes

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.

So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found in the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them....The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, he has dominion over it.

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

For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.

Contented with little yet wishing for more

[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.

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

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

bade her to doubt the stars were fire, and to doubt that the sun did move, to doubt truth to be a liar, but never to doubt that he loved;

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

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest?

Stranger, I discern neither sloth nor folly in you, and yet I see that you are poor and wretched: from which I gather that neither wisdom nor industry can secure felicity; only Jove bestows it upon whomsoever he pleases. He perhaps has reduced you to this plight. However, since your wanderings have brought you so near to our city, it lies in our duty to supply your wants. Clothes and what else a human hand should give to one so suppliant, and so tamed with calamity, you shall not want. We will shew you our city and tell you the name of our people. This is the land of the Phæacians, of which my father Alcinous is king.

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