Charles Lamb Quotes

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.

To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

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

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

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

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!

A babe is fed with milk and praise.

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

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.

I am in love with this green Earth.

My theory is to enjoy life, but my practice is against it.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

When twilight dews are falling soft Upon the rosy sea, love, I watch the star whose beam so oft Has lighted me to thee, love.

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?

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!

When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.

The only true time which a man can properly call his own, is 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.

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.

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!

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

I hate the man who eats without knowing what he’s eating. I doubt his taste in more important things.

There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try!

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.