Charles Lamb: Trending quotes

“Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,
That our worst foes cannot find us,
And ill fortune, that would thwart us,
Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;
While each man, through thy height'ning steam,
Does like a smoking Etna seem.”

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and irony itself-- do these things go out with life? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?”

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

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

“I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.”

“Of all sound of all bells… most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.”

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds.”

“The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.”

“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.”

“The flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry”

“Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trust
That He, who lays this mortal frame in dust,
Still hath the immortal Spirit in His keeping
In Jesus' sight they are not dead, but sleeping”

“Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.”

“I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.”

“Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?”

“And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.”

“How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.”

“He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.”

“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.”