Love Quote by Charles Lamb

A little scandalous on the tongue, Charles Lamb's line treats reading as a chosen self-erasure: not improvement, not information, but the pleasure of slipping out of one's own skull. The verb "lose" is the tell. It frames immersion as both voluntary and slightly dangerous, a surrender of control that a sober moralist might distrust. Lamb, a critic with a Romantic-era temperament and a London essayist's appetite for companionship, makes interiority social. He wants company not at the table but in the cortex.

"Other men's minds" carries the period's bias in plain view: the canon as a masculine club, authority coded male. That unselfconscious phrasing is part of the context. Lamb lived amid a burgeoning print culture where books made intimacy cheap and portable; you could be alone and still be in a crowd. His affection for old authors and his easy, talky prose suggest a reader who wants conversation across time, not doctrinal instruction. Calling it love also matters. He's insisting that criticism can be erotic in the broad sense: desire for proximity, for being changed.

The subtext is a defense of sympathetic imagination at a moment when identity and reason were being argued over as civic tools. Lamb quietly refuses the utilitarian posture. He isn't reading to win, to debate, to build a system; he's reading to be inhabited. For a critic, that's a sly inversion of power: the judge admits he's happiest when he stops judging and lets someone else take the wheel.