CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

CHARLES LAMB

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


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


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 has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

CHARLES LAMB

Essays of Elia

Tags: originality


He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833

Tags: lawyers


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

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

CHARLES LAMB

letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822

Tags: life


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


No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

CHARLES LAMB

attributed, Day's Collacon


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


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"


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


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