Charles Lamb quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Charles Lamb has a lot to say. In this list we present the 41 best Charles Lamb quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Charles Lamb quotes
I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.
— Charles Lamb
I love to lose myself in other men’s minds…. Books think for me.
— Charles Lamb
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
— Charles Lamb, The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb
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.
— Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.
— Charles Lamb
Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.
— Charles Lamb
I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer’s, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, ‘Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?’ I forget the decision.
— Charles Lamb
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father’s dwelling?
— Charles Lamb, Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays
Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
— Charles Lamb, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820
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!
— Charles Lamb
The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.
— Charles Lamb
We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.
— Charles Lamb
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space yet nothing troubles me less.
— Charles Lamb
Books think for me.
— Charles Lamb
If dirt was trumps what hands you would hold!
— Charles Lamb
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature … is perhaps cowardice.
— Charles Lamb
I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
— Charles Lamb
Here cometh April again and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.
— Charles Lamb
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense and have her nonsense respected.
— Charles Lamb
Man is a gaming animal.
— Charles Lamb
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.
— Charles Lamb
New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
— Charles Lamb
Man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other.
— Charles Lamb
The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.
— Charles Lamb
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
— Charles Lamb
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
— Charles Lamb
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!
— Charles Lamb
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony but organically I am incapable of a tune.
— Charles Lamb
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
— Charles Lamb
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
— Charles Lamb
I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.
— Charles Lamb
He might have proved a useful adjunct if not an ornament to society.
— Charles Lamb
Neat not gaudy.
— Charles Lamb
We all have some taste or other of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering that it was an acquired one.
— Charles Lamb
The only true time which a man can properly call his own is 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.
— Charles Lamb
For thy sake tobacco I Would do anything but die.
— Charles Lamb
Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space and yet nothing troubles me less.
— Charles Lamb
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
— Charles Lamb
The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive – you are leaking.
— Charles Lamb
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
— Charles Lamb
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
— Charles Lamb
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
— Charles Lamb
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