Charles Lamb Quotes

Charles Lamb was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb .

Friends with such literary luminaries as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt, Lamb was at the centre of a major literary circle in England. He has been referred to by E. V. Lucas, his principal biographer, as "the most lovable figure in English literature". Wikipedia  

✵ 10. February 1775 – 27. December 1834
Charles Lamb photo

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Last Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb
Essays of Elia
Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb: 85   quotes 9   likes

Famous Charles Lamb Quotes

“The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.”

Quoted in "Table Talk" http://books.google.com/books?id=LIxUAAAAcAAJ&q=%22greatest+pleasure+I+know+is+to+do+a+good+action+by+stealth+and+to+have+it+found+out+by+accident%22&pg=PA14#v=onepage in The Athenaeum magazine (4 January 1834).

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

Source: The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb

“A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.”

Poor Relations.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

Charles Lamb Quotes about life

“The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.”

Popular Fallacies: XIII, That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

Charles Lamb Quotes about books

“Books which are no books.”

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)..
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“Books think for me.”

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“Things in books' clothing.”

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition 's shown;
And all that history, much that fiction weaves.”

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Charles Lamb: Trending quotes

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.
Essays of Elia (1823)

Charles Lamb Quotes

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

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“The flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry”

Lamb's letter to Charles Cowden Clarke, in summer, 1821. As quoted in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1905). Letter 263.

“And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.”

Written at Cambridge; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.”

Letter to Samuel Rogers (December 21, 1833)

“Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.”

Letter to Mrs. Wordsworth (February 18, 1818)

“The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water.”

Abraham Hayward, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1848.
Attributed

“This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.”

Letter to Thomas Manning (December 26, 1815)<!-- published or quoted where? -->

“The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.”

Letter to Thomas Manning (February 15, 1802)

“It argues an insensibility.”

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.”

A Chapter on Ears; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Thou through such a mist dost show us,
That our best friends do not know us.”

A Farewell to Tobacco (1805)

“For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.”

A Farewell to Tobacco (1805)

“The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.”

Oxford in the Vacation.
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?”

On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born (1827).

“It is good to love the unknown.”

Valentine's Day; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Essays of Elia (1823)

“When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!”

Letter to Proctor (January 22, 1829), in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject (2000), p. 526

“Presents, I often say, endear absents.”

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

Letter to Southey (August 9, 1815)

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

Witches, and Other Night Fears.
Essays of Elia (1823)

“A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.”

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.”

Hester (1803), st. 7.

“I have something more to do than to feel.”

Letter to Coleridge (September 27, 1796), after the death of Lamb's mother.

“A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.”

Popular Fallacies: IX, That the Worst Puns Are the Best.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

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