Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Lamb - Page 5

As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee. As still to the star of its worship, though clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Half as sober as a judge.

A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood, Was in her cradle-coffin lying; Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.

By myself walking, To myself talking.

Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?

We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.

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

I even think that, sentimentally, I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune.

Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

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!

It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.

It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.

Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.

Not if I know myself at all.

I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

Mother's love grows by giving.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.