Quotes from Charles Lamb

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

Neat, not gaudy.

We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering that it was an acquired one.

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

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!

Suck, baby, suck! mother's love grows by giving, Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting...

But cards are war in disguise of a sport...

The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.

Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.

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

I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.

I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

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

I never knew an enemy of puns who was not an ill-natured man. A pun is a noble thing per se; it fills the mind, it is as perfect as a sonnet. May my last breath be drawn through a pipe and exhaled as a pun.

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

Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life

To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.