CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822

Tags: life


For I hate, yet love thee, so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrained hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.

CHARLES LAMB

"A Farewell to Tobacco"


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

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him.

CHARLES LAMB

"Decay of Beggars", Elia

Tags: charity


In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding.

CHARLES LAMB

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


The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822

Tags: friends


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


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


A number of moralists condemn lotteries and refuse to see anything noble in the passion of the ordinary gambler. They judge gambling as some atheists judge religion, by its excesses.

CHARLES LAMB

Essays of Elia

Tags: gambling


Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

CHARLES LAMB

"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia


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


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 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


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

CHARLES LAMB

A Complete Elia


No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

CHARLES LAMB

attributed, Day's Collacon


What a place to be is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours ... were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets.

CHARLES LAMB

Elia and the Last Essays of Elia

Tags: libraries


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


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