CHARLES LAMB QUOTES II

English essayist and critic (1775-1834)

Charles Lamb quote

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

CHARLES LAMB

"Witches and Other Night Fears", Essays of Elia


No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.

CHARLES LAMB

attributed, Day's Collacon


A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb

Tags: words


The vices of some men are magnificent.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb

Tags: vice


Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

CHARLES LAMB

"On Books and Reading", The Last Essays of Elia

Tags: John Milton


Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him.

CHARLES LAMB

"Decay of Beggars", Elia

Tags: charity


Books think for me.

CHARLES LAMB

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia


Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 23, 1802


Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

CHARLES LAMB

Mrs. Leicester's School and Other Writings in Prose and Verse


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

Tags: alcoholism


I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.

CHARLES LAMB

"A Bachelor's Complaint", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia

Tags: children


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


Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

CHARLES LAMB

"Valentine's Day", 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


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

Tags: religion


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


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

Tags: knowledge


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


Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb


I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

CHARLES LAMB

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia

Tags: reading