CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

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

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: reading


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


A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

CHARLES LAMB

Bon-Mots

Tags: laughter


Trample not on the ruins of a man.

CHARLES LAMB

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


The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Thomas Manning, Feb. 15, 1802


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 of which he is expected to show himself in public.

CHARLES LAMB

Essays of Elia

Tags: poverty


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


I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822


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


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

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


Cultivate simplicity ... or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight with it its own modest buds, and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nov. 8, 1796

Tags: simplicity


A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

CHARLES LAMB

"Popular Fallacies", Last Essays of Elia


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


Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

CHARLES LAMB

"All Fools' Day", Elia


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


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

CHARLES LAMB

"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: illness


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 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


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


He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833

Tags: lawyers