01c. 1804 ADI am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer's noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
02c. 1804 ADThey are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
03c. 1804 ADWhat a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
04c. 1804 ADHail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric. Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
05c. 1804 ADI love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
06c. 1804 ADI always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
08c. 1804 ADTis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
09c. 1804 ADA 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1804 ADThere is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
12c. 1804 ADI 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1804 ADFriend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?Charles Lamb / quote ↗
14c. 1804 ADCultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
15c. 1804 ADThink 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1804 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1804 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1804 ADNothing puzzles me more than time and space yet nothing troubles me less.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
21c. 1804 ADThe most mortifying infirmity in human nature ... is perhaps cowardice.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
22c. 1804 ADI have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
23c. 1804 ADHere cometh April again and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
24c. 1804 AD'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense and have her nonsense respected.Charles Lamb / quote ↗
