English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
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 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
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?
CHARLES LAMB
The Collected Essays of Charles Lamb
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
Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
CHARLES LAMB
A Complete Elia
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
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
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
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
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
CHARLES LAMB
"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of 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
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
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
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia
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
Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
CHARLES LAMB
Bon-Mots
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
No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
CHARLES LAMB
attributed, Day's Collacon