Laurence Sterne Quotes - Page 5

Always carry it in thy mind, and act upon it, as a sure maxim: "That women are timid:" And 'tis well they are--else there would beno dealing with them.

I live in a constant endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles, but much more when he laughs, it adds some thing to his fragment of life.

Vanity bids all her sons be brave, and all her daughters chaste and courteous.

There is one sweet lenitive at least for evils, which nature holds out; so I took it kindly at her hands, and fell asleep.

The way to fame, is like the way to heaven,--through much tribulation.

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size, take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one.

So fruitful is slander in variety of expedients to satiate as well as disguise itself. But if these smoother weapons cut so sore, what shall we say of open and unblushing scandal, subjected to no caution, tied down to no restraints?

There is such a torture, happily unknown to ancient tyranny, as talking a man to death. Marcus Aurelius advises to assent readily to great talkers--in hopes, I suppose, to put an end to the argument.

The great end of all religionis to purify our hearts--and conquer our passions--and in a word, to make us wiser and better men--better neighbours--better citizens--and better servants of GOD.

The more tickets you have in a lottery, the worse your chance. And it is the same of virtues, in the lottery of life.

When the affections so kindly break loose, Joy, is another name for Religion.

The soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time; andif he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him.

True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round.

Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions--tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece--must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?

Go, poor devil, get thee gone! Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

"They order," said I, "this matter better in France."

A man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad.

When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his HOBBY-HORSE grows head- strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion.

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.

How many thousands of [lives] are there every year that comes cast away, (in all civilized countries at least)--and consider'd asnothing but common air, in competition of an hypothesis.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the Younger affirm that he never read book so bad but he drew some profit from it.

I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.