Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an English author, critic, and minor poet. He is best known for the essays he wrote under the name Elia. He remains one of the most adored and read of English essayists.
Born in Temple, London, Lamb spent his ‘joyful schooldays’ at Christ’s Hospital, where he started a lasting friendship with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb earned his living as a clerk in the East India House. Much of his life was dedicated to caring for his sister Mary Lamb (1764–1847,) who killed their invalid mother in an attack of mania.
Lamb’s early efforts at writing included poetry, a little prose romance titled The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1797,) and John Woodvil (1801)—the result of his analysis of Elizabethan dramatic poetry, in whose revival he was to play so large a part.
Lamb is best known for his essays, most notably collected as The Essays of Elia (1820–23, 1833.) He is also remembered for his children’s books, which comprise Tales from Shakespeare (1807,) on which he collaborated with Mary.
Lamb’s eccentric wit—what he called a “self-pleasing quaintness”—was publicized through the identity of ‘Elia’ in The London Magazine (1820–25,) and his unfashionable dedication to London life as subject-matter earned him a place in the new Cockney School of metropolitan poets and essayists. By 1838, Charles Dickens was writing to associates endorsing the work of “the original kind-hearted, veritable Elia.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Lamb
The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Choice
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves: we encourage each other in mediocrity.—I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Associates
In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Science, Scientists
Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Beliefs, Weakness, Perspective
Mother’s love grows by giving.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Mothers, Mother
He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Books, Reading
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature … is, perhaps, cowardice.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Courage, Cowardice
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Children
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy’s holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.
—Charles Lamb
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Wealth, Value of a Day, Riches, Time Management
Ballads are the vocal portraits of the national mind.
—Charles Lamb
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
—Charles Lamb
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Books
Man while he loves is never quite depraved.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Love
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Reading, Books
So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Sin
Presents, I often say, endear absents.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Gifts
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Jews
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Lawyers
The beggar is the only person in the universe not obliged to study appearance.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Appearance
Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Gambling, Competition
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Libraries
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: The Universe
Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Teachers, Teaching
The vices of some men are magnificent.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Virtue, Vice
My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Contentment
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
—Charles Lamb
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Family
Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.
—Charles Lamb
Topics: Home
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