Charles Lamb citations

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

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

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

“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.”

“A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.”

“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.”

“Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.”

“The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water.”

“This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.”

“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.”

“Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.”

“A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.”

“The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.”

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

“In heav'n, the saint nor pity feels, nor care,
For those thus sentenced - pity might disturb
The delicate sense and most divine repose
Of spiritus angelical
Blessed be God,
The measure of his judgments is not fixed
By man's erroneous standard. He discerns
No such inordinate difference and vast
Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom
Such disproportion'd fates.
Compared with him,
No man on earth is holy called: they best
Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet
Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield,
To him of his own works the praise, his due.”

“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.”