CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

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


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


A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: words


'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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


A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 11, 1802


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


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


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


Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: wit


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 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

Tags: children


Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

CHARLES LAMB

Mrs. Leicester's School and Other Writings in Prose and Verse


Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 23, 1802


The vices of some men are magnificent.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: vice


A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

CHARLES LAMB

Bon-Mots

Tags: laughter


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


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

Tags: books


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