CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II
English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Superannuated Man", 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
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
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
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
No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
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
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Feb. 13, 1797
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
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Thomas Manning, Feb. 15, 1802
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
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
I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
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
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
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.
CHARLES LAMB
"A Farewell to Tobacco"
Anything awful makes me laugh.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Robert Southey, Aug. 9, 1815
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches