Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb
Charles Lambwas an English writer and essayist, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced with his sister, Mary Lamb...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth10 February 1775
pleasure
There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
friends party going-away
The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.
sight shy monkeys
We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.
taste remember ancient
We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one.
opinion species property
Opinions is a species of property - I am always desirous of sharing.
tombstone moving men
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!
new-year time years
No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.
thinking may way
You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.
grateful pigs might
(The pig) hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die.
mind body absence
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
world may shade
As half in shade and half in sun This world along its path advances, May that side the sun 's upon Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances!
eye heaven black
A Persian's heaven is eas'ly made: 'T is but black eyes and lemonade.
sweet water valleys
There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
apples soul library
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 labours 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 the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.