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
christian business communication
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.
sick solitude bed
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!
prayer gay years
I ask and wish not to appear More beauteous, rich or gay: Lord, make me wiser every year, And better every day.
money liberty may
O money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou are health and liberty and strength, and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!
friends court
It is good to have friends at court.
tombstone looks doe
Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.
tombstone ordinary disgusting
I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.
poverty dresses female
In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.
men smoking drs
Dr Parr...asked him, how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.'
heart library thee
I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.
littles merit god-knows
Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.
kings boys law
The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
vision tragedy nerves
We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.
reading thinking walking
When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think.