English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
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
Trample not on the ruins of a man.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
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
Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
CHARLES LAMB
A Complete Elia
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
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", 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
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
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
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 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
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"
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
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
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
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
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.
CHARLES LAMB
Mrs. Leicester's School and Other Writings in Prose and Verse
Books think for me.
CHARLES LAMB
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading", Last Essays of Elia
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
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