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Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

Charles Lamb

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Charles Lamb
Age: 59 †
Born: 1775
Born: February 10
Died: 1834
Died: December 27
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
London
England
Men
Positively
Works
Perhaps
Next
Best
Nothing
Thing
Good

More quotes by Charles Lamb

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To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.
Charles Lamb
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A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood, Was in her cradle-coffin lying Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying
Charles Lamb
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O money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou are health and liberty and strength, and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!
Charles Lamb
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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.
Charles Lamb
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You look wise, pray correct that error.
Charles Lamb
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Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.
Charles Lamb
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There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.
Charles Lamb
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I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.
Charles Lamb
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The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
Charles Lamb
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I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.
Charles Lamb
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May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome and that's the some on't.
Charles Lamb
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There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
Charles Lamb
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Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!
Charles Lamb
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I cannot sit and think books think for me.
Charles Lamb
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Fly not yet 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.
Charles Lamb
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For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
Charles Lamb
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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
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How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
Charles Lamb
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I could never hate anyone I knew.
Charles Lamb
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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?
Charles Lamb