Charles Lamb

The world meets nobody half way.

A Persian's heaven is eas'ly made: 'T is but black eyes and lemonade.

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us, All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.

Take all the pleasures of all the spheres, And multiply each through endless years,- One minute of heaven is worth them all.

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

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

(The pig) hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die.

By myself walking, To myself talking.

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

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 we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene?

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.

You look wise, pray correct that error.

English physicians kill you, the French let you die.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.

Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!

I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid

Thus, when the lamp that lighted The traveller at first goes out, He feels awhile benighted, And looks around in fear and doubt. But soon, the prospect clearing, By cloudless starlight on he treads, And thinks no lamp so cheering As that light which Heaven sheds.

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.

The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o'er sea or land we roam?

I give thee all,-I can no more, Though poor the off'ring be; My heart and lute are all the store That I can bring to thee.

And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.