372 Quotes by Charles Lamb

There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.

I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his com position.

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

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

Lawyers, I suppose were once children.

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!

The 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.

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.

Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool.