Charles Lamb

"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."

"I have no ear."

"Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune."

"I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair."

"Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength."

"Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door."

"It is good to love the unknown."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"Presents, I often say, endear absents."

"It argues an insensibility."

"A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature."

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds."

"When I am not walking, I am reading;"

"Books think for me."

"Things in books' clothing."

"Books which are no books."

"How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty."

"Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it."

"A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

"A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return."

"The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture."

"If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance."

"From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me."

"I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, 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. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty."

"Wie Krankheit die Dimension des Ichs vergrößert!"

"Nichts ist geschmackloser als die ganze Selbstgefälligkeit und Zufriedenheit, die aus den Gesichtern eines neu vermählten Paares leuchtet."

"Nichts gibt mir größere Rätsel auf als Zeit und Raum. Und doch bekümmert mich nichts weniger als Zeit und Raum, weil ich nie einen Gedanken an sie verschwende."

"Leichtgläubigkeit ist eines Mannes Schwäche und eines Kindes Stärke."

"Die unbändigen und stürmischen Genüsse des Lebens sind durch keinen Hauch von Sterblichkeit getrübt."

"Bücher denken für mich."