English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.
CHARLES LAMB
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Bon-Mots
Take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.
CHARLES LAMB
"All Fools' Day", Elia
Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?
CHARLES LAMB
"On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born"
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
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
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
CHARLES LAMB
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
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"
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
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
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
'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
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
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
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
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
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
CHARLES LAMB
"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia
Books think for me.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", 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
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