CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

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.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aug. 1800


I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

CHARLES LAMB

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: reading


Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb


How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.

CHARLES LAMB

"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: illness


I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Feb. 13, 1797

Tags: John Milton


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


It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.

CHARLES LAMB

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: actors


Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species.

CHARLES LAMB

"Grace Before Meat", Elia


The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb


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?

CHARLES LAMB

letter to George Dyer, Dec. 20, 1830


He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


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

Tags: John Milton


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 leveling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

CHARLES LAMB

"To the Shade of Elliston", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia

Tags: death


'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb


Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity -- then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

CHARLES LAMB

"Oxford in the Vacation", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia


Anything awful makes me laugh.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Robert Southey, Aug. 9, 1815


Are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert; or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?

CHARLES LAMB

"Estimate of De Foe's Secondary Novels", The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb: Miscellaneous prose, 1798-1834

Tags: solitude


Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.

CHARLES LAMB

"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia

Tags: alcoholism


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

Tags: madness


I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to John Chambers, 1817

Tags: religion