CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

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

Tags: borrowing, lending


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


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


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


Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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 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


Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Feb. 13, 1797

Tags: friendship


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


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


'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


Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit of which he is expected to show himself in public.

CHARLES LAMB

Essays of Elia

Tags: poverty


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


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


Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


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