Charles Lamb

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." …

Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

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.

For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

Stinking’st of the stinking kind, Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, Africa, that brags her foyson, Breeds no such prodigious poison, Henbane, nightshade, both together, Hemlock, aconite—

Thou through such a mist dost show us, That our best friends do not know us.

Thou in such a cloud dost bind us, That our worst foes cannot find us, And ill fortune, that would thwart us, Shoots at rovers, shooting at us; While each man, through thy height'ning steam, Does like a smoking Etna seem.

Nay, rather, Plant divine, of rarest virtue; Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.

For thy sake, tobacco, I Would do anything but die.

For I hate, yet love thee, so, That, whichever thing I show, The plain truth will seem to be A constrained hyperbole, And the passion to proceed More from a mistress than a weed.

Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, …

Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

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.

And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.

Not if I know myself at all.

The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier …

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trust That He, who lays this mortal frame in dust, Still hath the immortal Spirit in His keeping In Jesus' sight they are not dead, but sleeping

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?

Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart, Just as the whim bites. For my part, I do not care a farthing candle For either of them, nor for Handel.

When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'