Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia Quotes

“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, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“The inventor of [this saying, 'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that ‘that was impossible, because he was dead.’ An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“I am sentimentally disposed to harmony but organically incapable of tune.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“I don't envy the mule his labyrinthine inlets, those indispensable side-intelligencers.”
― charles lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“On these little visual interpretations [Valentine's Day cards], no emblem is so common as the heart, — that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the bestuck and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal," or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff' to bestow?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet of a great family ; some neglected lump of nobility ; or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favourite watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his com position.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel ; perpetually changing postures and connexions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratching in a breath; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia