Charles Lamb Quotes

English writer

Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea. As half in shade and half in sun This world along its path advances, May that side the sun 's upon Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances! There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet. What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours 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 the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. 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. So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. All people have their blind side-their superstitions. How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author. Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick. How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked! I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below? Coleridge declares that a man cannot have a good conscience who refuses apple dumplings, and I confess that I am of the same opinion. Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society. He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. Presents, I often say, endear absents. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.<br />We are only what might have been... For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think. Books which are no books. My only books Were woman's looks,- And folly 's all they 've taught me.

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