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 have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below?
Things in books' clothing.
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.
A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.
Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."
Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites. For my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, nor for Handel.
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 indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
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!
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
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.
Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.
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.
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.