CHARLES LAMB QUOTES III

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

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

Tags: John Milton


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"


The vices of some men are magnificent.

CHARLES LAMB

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

Tags: vice


Anything awful makes me laugh.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Robert Southey, Aug. 9, 1815


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


No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

CHARLES LAMB

attributed, Day's Collacon


Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

CHARLES LAMB

"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia


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


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


Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity -- then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

CHARLES LAMB

"Oxford in the Vacation", Elia and the 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

Tags: vacations


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

CHARLES LAMB

Captain Starkey

Tags: society


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

Tags: solitude


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


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


Cultivate simplicity ... or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight with it its own modest buds, and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nov. 8, 1796

Tags: simplicity


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


It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.

CHARLES LAMB

"Grace Before Meat", Elia


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