Charles Lamb Quotes
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.
I came home forever on tuesday in last week. The incomprenhensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity.
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.
I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves; we encourage each other in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twillight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles.
A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler. They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.
Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
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.
I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer’s noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music.
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest.
I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!
There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
The more any object is spiritualized, the more delightful it is. There is much delight in the tragical representation of those things which in reality would be sights full of amazement and horror. The ticklings of fancy are more delightful than the touches of sense. How does poetry insinuate and turn about the minds of men! Anacreon might take more delight in one of his odes than in one of his cups; Catullus might easily find more sweetness in one of his epigrams than in the lips of a Lesbia. Sappho might take more complacency in one of her verses than in her practices. The nearer anything comes to mental joy, the purer and choicer it is. It is the observation not only of Aristotle, but of every one almost, "Some things delight merely because of their novelty;" and that surely upon this account, because the mind, which is the spring of joy, is more fixed and intense upon such things. The rosebud thus pleases more than the blown rose.
