writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, children's writer
1775 – 1834
The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking.
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
Severe and saintly righteousness Bought with his blood the marriage ring
Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trustIn Jesus' sight they are not dead, but sleeping
Far transcend my weak invention.Who looks not to the skin, but heart.
The flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry
I have something more to do than to feel.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.
Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
Gone beforeTo that unknown and silent shore.
A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.
Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.
[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.
Who first invented work, and bound the freeSabbath-less Satan!
I came home for ever!
Riddle of destiny, who can showWhat thy errand here below?
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'
Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,For either of them, nor for Handel.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
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.
Not if I know myself at all.
And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
Neat, not gaudy.
Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
For I hate, yet love thee, so,More from a mistress than a weed.
For thy sake, tobacco, IWould do anything but die.
Nay, rather,Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.
Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,Does like a smoking Etna seem.
Thou through such a mist dost show us,That our best friends do not know us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.
Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it …
A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.
I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
New Year's Day is every man's birthday.