CHARLES LAMB QUOTES
English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too (so we think) because he is like man--as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
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
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
'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
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
A laxity pervades the popular use of words.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
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
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
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.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Two Races of Men", 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
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
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
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
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 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
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
CHARLES LAMB
Captain Starkey
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
CHARLES LAMB
Bon-Mots
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833