All Quotes

"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life."

"Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?"

"Gone before To that unknown and silent shore."

"A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor."

"Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral."

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

"[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."

"I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is."

"Fanny Kelly's divine plain face."

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

"The flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry"

"I came home for ever!"

"A Pun is a Noble Thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. A Pun is a sole object for reflection (vide my aids to that recessment from a savage state)—it is entire, it fills the mind: it is perfect as a Sonnet, better."

"Far transcend my weak invention. ’Tis a simple Christian child, Missionary young and mild, From her store of script’ral knowledge (Bible-taught without a college) Which by reading she could gather, Teaches him to say Our Father To the common Parent, who Colour not respects nor hue. White and Black in him have part, Who looks not to the skin, but heart."

"Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?"

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

"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."

"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?"

"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"

"He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides."

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

"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 qualities, it appeared a glorified candy."

"Not if I know myself at all."

"And half had staggered that stout Stagirite."

"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."

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

"Neat, not gaudy."

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

"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, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me.""

"Riches are chiefly good because they give us time."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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—"

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

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

"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."

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

"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." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!"

"A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game."

"And thou shalt in thy daughter see, This picture, once, resembled thee."

"Wearied then and glad of rest, Like the linnet in the nest."

"Beauty from order springs."

"The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses any thing in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."

"Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him."

"All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed."

"Evil perpetually tends to disappear."

"Man needed one moral constitution to fit him for his original state; he needs another to fit him for his present state; and he has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness."