English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
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
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
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 11, 1802
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
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
Your borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.
CHARLES LAMB
Mrs. Leicester's School and Other Writings in Prose and Verse
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
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
CHARLES LAMB
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
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
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
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833
What a place to be is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours ... were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets.
CHARLES LAMB
Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisition.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Old and the New Schoolmaster", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
CHARLES LAMB
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Superannuated Man", Last Essays of Elia