English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table Talk", Works: Essays and Sketches
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
Trample not on the ruins of a man.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of 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
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
CHARLES LAMB
"Confessions of a Drunkard", The Last Essays of Elia
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
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
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
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
Who first invented work and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
To the unremitting importunity
Of business, in the green fields, and the town;
To plough, loom, anvil, spade--and oh! most sad!
To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
SABBATHLESS SATAN!
CHARLES LAMB
"Sonnet", The Examiner, Jun. 20, 1819
The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble leveling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
CHARLES LAMB
"To the Shade of Elliston", Elia and 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
A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
CHARLES LAMB
"Popular Fallacies", Last Essays of Elia
Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jun. 10, 1796
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
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
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
CHARLES LAMB
letter to George Dyer, Dec. 20, 1830
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
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