CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II
English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
CHARLES LAMB
Captain Starkey
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
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
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
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
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
Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
CHARLES LAMB
A Complete Elia
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"
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
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
Trample not on the ruins of a man.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
'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
Are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert; or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?
CHARLES LAMB
"Estimate of De Foe's Secondary Novels", The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb: Miscellaneous prose, 1798-1834
Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain, but going through fire? What if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? What if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? Is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul?
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
Books think for me.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia
But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering fantom of the distance keep touch with me? Or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come.
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
CHARLES LAMB
"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia
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
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
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