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Charles Lamb Quotes
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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
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Charles Lamb: 85   quotes 9   likes

Charles Lamb Quotes

“Not if I know myself at all.”

Charles Lamb

The Old and New Schoolmaster; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!”

Charles Lamb

Lamb's Suppers; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“MY dearest friend — White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses, — I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Bluecoat school has been very very kind to us, and we have no other friend, but thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write, —as religious a letter as possible— but no mention of what is gone and done with. —With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do that [than] to feel. God almighty have us all in his keeping.”

Charles Lamb

Lamb in September 27, 1796. In his letter to Coleridge; after the family tragedy. As quoted in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Letters (1905).

Death , God , Fear , School

“He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.”

Charles Lamb

Captain Starkey; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two, when you talk in a religious strain,—not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy, than consistent with the humility of genuine piety. To instance now in your last letter—you say, “it is by the press [sic], that God hath given finite spirits both evil and good (I suppose you mean simply bad men and good men), a portion as it were of His Omnipresence!” Now, high as the human intellect comparatively will soar, and wide as its influence, malign or salutary, can extend, is there not, Coleridge, a distance between the Divine Mind and it, which makes such language blasphemy? Again, in your first fine consolatory epistle you say, “you are a temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature.” What more than this do those men say, who are for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an unknown Trinity,—men, whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters? Man, full of imperfections, at best, and subject to wants which momentarily remind him of dependence; man, a weak and ignorant being, “servile” from his birth “to all the skiey influences,” with eyes sometimes open to discern the right path, but a head generally too dizzy to pursue it; man, in the pride of speculation, forgetting his nature, and hailing in himself the future God, must make the angels laugh. Be not angry with me, Coleridge; I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New Testament (our best guide), is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent: and in my poor mind ’tis best for us so to consider of Him, as our heavenly Father, and our best Friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of His nature. Let us learn to think humbly of ourselves, and rejoice in the appellation of “dear children,” “brethren,” and “co-heirs with Christ of the promises,” seeking to know no further… God love us all, and may He continue to be the father and the friend of the whole human race!”

Charles Lamb

Lamb's letter to Coleridge in Oct. 24th, 1796. As quoted in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1905). Letter 11.

Love , Men , God , Children

“I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”

Charles Lamb

Old Familiar Faces (1798).

School , Childhood

“A good-natured woman…which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.”

Charles Lamb

Letter to Hazlitt (November 10, 1805)

Nature

“Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.”

Charles Lamb

cited in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 186.

Time

“Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
.........
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
.........
Sabbath-less Satan!”

Charles Lamb

Work (1819).

Holiday , Dead

“Neat, not gaudy.”

Charles Lamb

Letter to Wordsworth (1806); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I came home for ever!”

Charles Lamb

Letter to Bernard Barton (April 6, 1825), on leaving his "33 years' desk" at the East India House.

Home

“This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco!”

Charles Lamb

Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.
Letter to Thomas Manning (December 26, 1815)

Night

“I have no ear.”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

A Chapter on Ears.
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Atheists, or Deists only in the name,
By word or deed deny a God. They eat
Their daily bread, & draw the breath of heaven,
Without a thought or thanks; heav'n's roof to them
Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps,
No more, that light them to their purposes.
They 'wander loose about.'”

Charles Lamb

They nothing see,
Themselves except, and creatures like themselves,
That liv'd short-sighted, impotent to save.
So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late,
Destruction cometh 'like an armed man,'
Or like a dream of murder in the night,
Withering their mortal faculties, & breaking
The bones of all their pride.
Living Without God In The World (1798)

God , Drawing , Painting , Light