Charles Lamb - Essays of Elia

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The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

Charles Lamb
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.

Charles Lamb
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Charles Lamb
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.

Charles Lamb
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

Charles Lamb
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.

Charles Lamb
A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.

Charles Lamb
Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

Charles Lamb
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.

Charles Lamb
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Charles Lamb
Man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other.

Charles Lamb
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how kinglike he sways his pillow-tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and molding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.

Charles Lamb
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!

Charles Lamb
He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?

Charles Lamb
The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

Charles Lamb
Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations.

Charles Lamb
A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being.

Charles Lamb
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

Charles Lamb
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!

Charles Lamb
I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.

Charles Lamb