Charles Lamb

“'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'...The inventor of [this saying] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.”

“Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?”

“My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.”

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds”

“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.”

“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.”

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

“New Year's Day is every man's birthday.”

“There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.”

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

“Dream not...of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.”

“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.”

“Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!”

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading.”

“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.”

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

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

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

“I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.”