Laurence Sterne Quotes - Page 3

Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge.

When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains.

The most affluent may be stripped of all, and find his worldly comforts, like so many withered leaves, dropping from him.

A coward never forgives.

People who overly take care of their health are like misers. They hoard up a treasure which they never enjoy.

Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.

Simplicity is the great friend to nature, and if I would be proud of anything in this silly world, it should be of this honest alliance.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.

Beauty has so many charms, one knows not how to speak against it; and when it happens that a graceful figure is the habitation of a virtuous soul, when the beauty of the face speaks out the modesty and humility of the mind, and the justness of the proportion raises our thoughts up to the heart and wisdom of the great Creator, something may be allowed it,--and something to the embellishments which set it off; and yet, when the whole apology is read, it will be found at last that beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.

When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage - that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.

If thou art rich, then show the greatness of thy fortune; or what is better, the greatness of thy soul, in the meekness of thy conversation; condescend to men of low estate, support the distressed, and patronize the neglected. Be great.

Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

To saya man is fallen in love,or that he is deeply in love,or up to the ears in love,and sometimes even over head and ears in it,carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,I hold to be damnable and heretical:and so much for that. Let love therefore be what it will,my uncleToby fell into it.

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

There have been no sects in the Christian world, however absurd, which have not endeavoured to support their opinions by arguments drawn from Scripture.

'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.

Chance is the providence of adventurers.

Philosophy has a fine saying for everything.-For Death it has an entire set.

Positiveness is a most absurd foible. If you are in the right, it lessens your triumph; if in the wrong, it adds shame to your defeat.

A good simile,--as concise as a king's declaration of love.

I know as well as any one, [the devil] is an adversary, whom if we resist, he will fly from us--but I seldom resist him at all; from a terror, that though I may conquer, I may still get a hurt in the combat--soinstead of thinking to make him fly, I generally fly myself.

It is sweet to feel by what fine spun threads our affections are drawn together.