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.
Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.
If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.
For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.
For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.
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.
Nay, rather,
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.
The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.
Presents, I often say, endear absents.
Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.
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.
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
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!
It is good to love the unknown.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.