Home › Authors › Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb Quotes
1775–1834 England
Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834) was an 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.
Also known as: Lamb, Charles
Random Charles Lamb quote
85 quotes
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.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
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.
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
Letter to John Chambers (1817)
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'
I ask and wish not to appear
A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
Essays of Elia (1823)
A babe is fed with milk and praise.
A child's a plaything for an hour.
Methinks, you and I should have been born under the same roof, sucked the same milk, conned the same horn-book, thumbed the same Testament together; for we have been more than sisters, Maria!
Rosamund Gray (1798)
Thou through such a mist dost show us,
A Farewell to Tobacco (1805)
Who first invented work, and bound the free
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature...but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind.
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?
I think this will be as good a pattern for orders as I can think on. A little thin flowery border round, neat not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo with the harp at the top.
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.
Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
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?
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 ...
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
Topics Charles Lamb is quoted on
Works