Titles of honor are like the impressions on coin, which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Honor, Titles
We lose the right of complaining sometimes, by denying something, but this often triples its force.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Complaints, Complaining, Pessimism
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.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Hypocrisy
Both music and painting add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Music
Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Conscience
The way to fame is like the way to heaven, through much tribulation.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Fame
For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Humor
It shocks me to think how much mischief almost every man may do, who will but resolve to do all he can.
—Laurence Sterne
Precedents are the band and disgrace of legislation.—They are not wanted to justify right measures, and are absolutely insufficient to excuse wrong ones. They can only be useful to heralds, dancing-masters, and gentlemen ushers.
—Laurence Sterne
Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Journeys
To judge rightly of our own worth we should retire from the world so as to see both its pleasures and pains in their proper light and dimensions—thus taking the heart from off this world and its allurements, which so dishonor the understanding as to turn the wisest of men into fools and children.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Retirement
The very essence of assumed gravity is design, and consequently deceit; a taught trick to gain credit with the world for more sense and knowledge than a man is worth.
—Laurence Sterne
The improbability of a malicious story serves to help forward the currency of it, because it increases the scandal. So that, in such instances, the world is like the one who said he believed some things because they were absurd and impossible.
—Laurence Sterne
There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman’s pulse.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Doctors, Medicine
There are some tempers wrought up by habitual selfishness to an utter insensibility of what becomes of the fortunes of their fellow-creatures, as if they were not partakers of the same nature or had no lot or connection at all with the species.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Selfishness
Hail! ye small sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty which beget inclinations to love at first sight; ’tis ye who open the door and let the stranger in.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Manners, Courtesy
Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other; and he only who knows how to accommodate himself to their returns, and can wisely extract the good from the evil, knows how to live.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Pain
It is almost impossible for any one who reads much, and reflects a, good deal, to be able, on every occasion, to determine whether a thought was another’s or his own.—I have several times quoted sentences out of my own writings, in aid of my own arguments, in conversation, thinking that I was supporting them by some better authority.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Originality
Beauty hath so many charms one knows not how to speak against it; and when 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, it raises our thoughts up to the great Creator; but after all, beauty, like truth, is never so glorious as when it goes the plainest.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Beauty
I fear nothing but doing wrong.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Sin
Lessons of wisdom have never such power over us as when they are wrought into the heart through the groundwork of a story which engages the passions. Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon? Or is the heart so in love with deceit, that where a true report will not reach it, we must cheat it with a fable in order to come at the truth?
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Romance
In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself; in the world it seeks or accepts of a few treacherous supports—the feigned compassions of one, the flattery of a second, the civilities of a third, the friendship of a fourth; they all deceive, and bring the mind back to retirement, reflection, and books.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Solitude
Only the brave know how to forgive… A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Forgiveness
Great is the power of eloquence; but never is it so great as when it pleads along with nature, and the culprit is a child strayed from his duty, and returned to it again with tears.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Eloquence
I never drink.—I cannot do it on equal terms with others.—It costs them only one day; but it costs me three; the first in sinning, the second in suffering, and the third in repenting.
—Laurence Sterne
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.
—Laurence Sterne
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.
—Laurence Sterne
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding up a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.
—Laurence Sterne
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.
—Laurence Sterne
Topics: Parents, Parenting
What persons are by starts, they are by nature—you see them at such times off their guard.—Habit may restrain vice, and virtue may be obscured by passion, but intervals best discover man.
—Laurence Sterne
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Richard Chenevix Trench Irish Archbishop, Poet
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
- Sheridan Le Fanu Irish Novelist
- Joyce Cary English Novelist
- James Joyce Irish Novelist
- Samuel Lover Irish Writer, Artist, Songwriter
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) British Anglican Author
- Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington Irish Novelist
- Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
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