CHARLES LAMB QUOTES III

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833

Tags: lawyers


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

CHARLES LAMB

"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: illness


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


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


We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: evolution


Who first invented work and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
To the unremitting importunity
Of business, in the green fields, and the town;
To plough, loom, anvil, spade--and oh! most sad!
To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
SABBATHLESS SATAN!

CHARLES LAMB

"Sonnet", The Examiner, Jun. 20, 1819

Tags: work


Anything awful makes me laugh.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Robert Southey, Aug. 9, 1815


Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

CHARLES LAMB

Mrs. Leicester's School and Other Writings in Prose and Verse


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

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: reading


It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.

CHARLES LAMB

"Grace Before Meat", Elia


Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: wit


Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?

CHARLES LAMB

"On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born"


'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


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


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

Tags: knowledge


Books think for me.

CHARLES LAMB

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


But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering fantom of the distance keep touch with me? Or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come.

CHARLES LAMB

Essays of Elia

Tags: vacations


Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

CHARLES LAMB

A Complete Elia


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