English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain, but going through fire? What if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? What if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? Is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul?
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
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
Books think for me.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia
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
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
Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
CHARLES LAMB
A Complete Elia
Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trust
That He, who lays this mortal frame in dust,
Still hath the immortal Spirit in His keeping
In Jesus' sight they are not dead, but sleeping.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Vincent Novello, Nov. 8, 1830
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
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
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!
CHARLES LAMB
"New Year's Eve", 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
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
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
'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
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
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
CHARLES LAMB
Bon-Mots
Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
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
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Convalescent", 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