Charles Lamb

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Charles Lamb (February 10 1775 – December 27 1834) was an English essayist and poet, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb.

Contents

Sourced [edit]

  • Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
  • I have something more to do than to feel.
  • I have had playmates, I have had companions,
    In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days—
    All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
    • Old Familiar Faces (1798).
  • 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.
  • Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.
  • The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
  • Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
  • Gone before
    To that unknown and silent shore.
    • Hester (1803), st. 7.
  • A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.
  • This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.
  • I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
  • Who first invented work, and bound the free
    And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
    . . . . . . . . .
    To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
    . . . . . . . . .
    Sabbathless Satan!
    • Work (1819).
  • I came home for ever!
  • Riddle of destiny, who can show
    What thy short visit meant, or know
    What thy errand here below?
    • On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born (1827).
  • When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'
  • Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
    Just as the whim bites. For my part,
    I do not care a farthing candle
    For either of them, nor for Handel.
  • 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?
  • The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
    • Table Talk. In The Athenaeum (1834).
  • Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!
    • Letter to Proctor, January 22, 1829.
  • The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
    • My First Play; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Not if I know myself at all.
    • The Old and New Schoolmaster; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.
    • Written at Cambridge; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
    In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
    The very marrow of tradition 's shown;
    And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
    • To the Editor of the Every-Day Book; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
    • Captain Starkey; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Neat, not gaudy.
    • Letter to Wordsworth (1806); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
    • Lamb's Suppers; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."
    • Autobiographical Recollections (Leslie) ; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
    • cited in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 186.

A Farewell to Tobacco (1805) [edit]

  • 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.
  • For thy sake, tobacco, I
    Would do anything but die.
  • Nay, rather,
    Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
    Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.
  • Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,
    That our worst foes cannot find us,
    And ill fortune, that would thwart us,
    Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;
    While each man, through thy height'ning steam,
    Does like a smoking Etna seem.
  • Thou through such a mist dost show us,
    That our best friends do not know us.

Essays of Elia (1823) [edit]

  • The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
    • Oxford in the Vacation.
  • For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
    • Oxford in the Vacation.
  • The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
    • The Two Races of Men.
  • Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
    • The Two Races of Men.
  • I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!
    • New Year's Eve.
  • A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.
    • Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • I have no ear.
    • A Chapter on Ears.
  • Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.
    • A Chapter on Ears; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
    • Imperfect Sympathies.
  • Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
    • Witches, and Other Night Fears.
  • Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
    • Valentine's Day.
  • It is good to love the unknown.
    • Valentine's Day; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
    • The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.
  • Presents, I often say, endear absents.
    • A Dissertation upon Roast Pig; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • It argues an insensibility.
    • A Dissertation upon Roast Pig; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Last Essays of Elia (1833) [edit]

  • A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.
    • Poor Relations.
  • I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
    • Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
  • Books think for me.
    • Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
  • Things in books' clothing.
    • Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
  • Books which are no books.
    • Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)..
  • How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
    • The Convalescent.
  • Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
    • Amicus Redivivus.
  • A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
    • Popular Fallacies: IX, That the Worst Puns Are the Best.
  • A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.
    • Popular Fallacies: XI, That We Must Not Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth.
  • The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.
    • Popular Fallacies: XIII, That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog.
  • If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.
    • “The superannuated man”
  • From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.
    • “The superannuated man”
  • I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.
    • “The superannuated man”
  • Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.
    • “The superannuated man”
  • Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it …
    • “The superannuated man”
  • 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.
    • “The superannuated man”
  • I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.
    • “The superannuated man”

Attributed [edit]

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