Quotes from Charles Lamb

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

The beggar wears all colors fearing none.

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

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

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

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

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

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.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

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

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

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading, I cannot sit and think. Books think for me

Contented with little yet wishing for more

There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.

I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

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.

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own-- 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.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?

I love to lose myself in other men's minds