Charles Lamb

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

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.

An album is a garden, not for show<br />Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.

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

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them.

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.

I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

Man is a gaming animal.

Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.

Oh call it by some better name, For friendship sounds too cold.

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

Who first invented work, and bound the free And holiday-rejoicing spirit down . . . . To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? . . . . Sabbathless Satan!

Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me!

May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the some on't.

May my last breath be drawn through a pipe, and exhaled in a jest.

I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.