CHARLES LAMB QUOTES IV

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches


I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Feb. 13, 1797

Tags: John Milton


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


The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble leveling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

CHARLES LAMB

"To the Shade of Elliston", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia

Tags: death


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


A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

CHARLES LAMB

"Popular Fallacies", 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