The human species is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
Source: Essays of Elia, The Two Races of Men
Author
English · 1775-1834 · 46 quotes
English · 1775–1834
46 quotes in our collection
Charles Lamb was the English essayist who made the personal essay into something new: conversational, self-deprecating, and quietly profound. His Essays of Elia, published in the 1820s, are ostensibly by a fictional clerk at the South Sea House but are unmistakably Lamb — a man who nursed his sister Mary through lifelong mental illness, worked thirty-three years as a clerk at the East India Company, and found in literature the freedom his circumstances denied him. His prose moves with the unhurried ease of someone who has thought carefully and written lightly. His observation that a laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market is both critical principle and personal survival strategy. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt were his friends; his letters to them are among the finest in English.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
The human species is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes.
To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it.
A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.
Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing!
I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle.
How I like to be liked, and what a dear curse is the inability to be popular!