English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
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
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
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
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
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
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.
CHARLES LAMB
"A Bachelor's Complaint", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia