Quotes from Charles Lamb

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.

Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

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

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

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

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

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.

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

Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

Presents, I often say, endear absents.

[Of Coleridge:] An archangel a little damaged.

New Year's is every man's birthday.

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

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.

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

A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Who first invented work, and bound the freeAnd holiday-rejoicing spirit down?

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

Borrowers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.