Quotes from Charles Lamb

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.

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

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.

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

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

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.

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

Many are the sayings of Elia... scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the dust of some of these it is our intention occasionally to revive a tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate.... seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom...

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

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.

I came home forever!

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.

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

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.

Cleanliness, said some sage man, is next to godliness. It may be, but how it came to sit so near is the marvel.

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

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print... substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.

How a sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated in him as his only duty,

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

Lawers, I suppose, were children once.

My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.

Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a newly married couple.