Quote

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.

Charles Lamb

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Lamb
Age: 59 †
Born: 1775
Born: February 10
Died: 1834
Died: December 27
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
London
England
Long
Dirt
Blots
Ears
Buttered
Dog
Topography
Reading
Muffins
Known
Bookstores
Read
Reads
Better
Trace
Book
Tea

More quotes by Charles Lamb

Image
The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.
Charles Lamb
Image
This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.
Charles Lamb
Image
While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.
Charles Lamb
Image
There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
Charles Lamb
Image
A babe is fed with milk and praise.
Charles Lamb
Image
It is good to love the unknown.
Charles Lamb
Image
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.
Charles Lamb
Image
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
Charles Lamb
Image
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
Charles Lamb
Image
Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.
Charles Lamb
Image
The only true time which a man can properly call his own, is 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.
Charles Lamb
Image
I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices - made up of likings and dislikings.
Charles Lamb
Image
No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
Charles Lamb
Image
May my last breath be drawn through a pipe, and exhaled in a jest.
Charles Lamb
Image
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
Charles Lamb
Image
How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!
Charles Lamb
Image
Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.
Charles Lamb
Image
Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby's daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.
Charles Lamb
Image
The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
Charles Lamb
Image
She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.
Charles Lamb