CHARLES LAMB QUOTES

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

Books think for me.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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


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


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"


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


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


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


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

CHARLES LAMB

"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: illness


Anything awful makes me laugh.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Robert Southey, Aug. 9, 1815


Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

CHARLES LAMB

"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia

Tags: newspapers


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

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: reading


Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.

CHARLES LAMB

"The Superannuated Man", Elia and The last essays of Elia

Tags: time


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


The vices of some men are magnificent.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: vice


Trample not on the ruins of a man.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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


Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain, but going through fire? What if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? What if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? Is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul?

CHARLES LAMB

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