Charles Lamb

Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?

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.

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

I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings.

The true poet dreams being awake.

Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.

A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!

How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!

This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, Theres nothing true but Heaven.

I am in love with this green Earth.

The vices of some men are magnificent.

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

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.

His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new married couple; in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes for her.

A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

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

We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.

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.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

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.

Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.

Mother's love grows by giving.

Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.

I am in love with the green earth.