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.
Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.
A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water.
Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.
Books which are no books.
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?
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
It is good to love the unknown.
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!
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
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.
For I hate, yet love thee, so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrained hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.
I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.
It argues an insensibility.
[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.
Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.