English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
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
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?
CHARLES LAMB
The Collected Essays of Charles Lamb
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
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
Who first invented work and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
To the unremitting importunity
Of business, in the green fields, and the town;
To plough, loom, anvil, spade--and oh! most sad!
To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
SABBATHLESS SATAN!
CHARLES LAMB
"Sonnet", The Examiner, Jun. 20, 1819
We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
The vices of some men are magnificent.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
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
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
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
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
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
CHARLES LAMB
letter to George Dyer, Dec. 20, 1830
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
CHARLES LAMB
"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
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
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"
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
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia
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
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