Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834)
English essayist and poet, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb.
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.
Thou through such a mist dost show us,
That our best friends do not know us.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
Not if I know myself at all.
Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it …
The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'
A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
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.
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
. . . . . . . . .
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
. . . . . . . . .
Sabbathless Satan!
Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.