CHARLES LAMB QUOTES
English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler. They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
For I hate, yet love thee, so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrained hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.
CHARLES LAMB
"A Farewell to Tobacco"
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!
CHARLES LAMB
"New Year's Eve", Essays of Elia
Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trust
That He, who lays this mortal frame in dust,
Still hath the immortal Spirit in His keeping
In Jesus' sight they are not dead, but sleeping.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Vincent Novello, Nov. 8, 1830
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
CHARLES LAMB
"Valentine's Day", Essays of Elia
Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him.
CHARLES LAMB
"Decay of Beggars", Elia
No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
CHARLES LAMB
attributed, Day's Collacon
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
CHARLES LAMB
"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia
Trample not on the ruins of a man.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisition.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Old and the New Schoolmaster", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
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
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 11, 1802
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!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 23, 1802
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833
Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jun. 10, 1796
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
CHARLES LAMB
Bon-Mots