“There is not a greater paradox in nature,--than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.”
“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.”
“To have the fear of God before our eyes, and, in our mutual dealings with each other, to govern our actions by the eternal measures of right and wrong:MThe first of these will comprehend the duties of religion;Mthe second, those of morality, which are so inseparably connected together, that you cannot divide these two tableswithout breaking and mutually destroying them both.”
“There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho' there can be no happiness without pleasure--yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.--We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Laurence Sterne (Illustrated)
“There are few instances of the exercise of particular virtues which seem harder to attain to, or which appear more amiable and engaging in themselves, than those of moderation and the forgiveness of injuries.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“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.”
Source: The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“So often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or wrong,--at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I reverence truth as much as any body; andif a man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for itI'll go to the world's end with him:MBut I hate disputes.”
“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.”
Source: 3 Books by Laurence Sterne
“The circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape;--and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c. With a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“When the precipitancy of a man's wishes hurries on his ideas ninety times faster than the vehicle he rides in--woe be to truth!”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Laurence Sterne (Illustrated)
“But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries--the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which thequickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works.”
Source: Works, Containing the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters and C
“Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,--and has wit in it, and instruction too,--if we can but find it out.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT--as his RESISTANCE.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c. With a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“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.”
Source: The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne, in One Volume
“I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work 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?”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author
“The insolence of base minds in success is boundless; and would scarce admit of a comparison, did not they themselves furnish us with one in the degrees of their abjection when evil returns upon them.”
Source: The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne: With a Life of the Author
“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?”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“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.”
Source: 3 Books by Laurence Sterne
“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 'Tis all barren--and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.”
Source: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts
“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.”
“The proper education of poor children [is] the ground-work of almost every other kind of charity.... Without this foundation firstlaid, how much kindnessis unavoidably cast away?”
“Surely, 'tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him soso here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the characterof generosity and virtue.”
“[I have] been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another.”
“Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, that the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.”
Source: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. And A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy ... With Life of the Author by Sir Walter Scott, Portrait, and Outline Wood Engravings After Thomas Stothard
“Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.”
Source: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts
“We all cry out that the world is corrupt,--and I fear too justly,--but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that itis our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author
“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing, and who, having eyes to see, what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.”
Source: The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“Every obstruction of the course of justice,--is a door opened to betray society, and bereave us of those blessings which it has inview.... It is a strange way of doing honour to God, to screen actions which are a disgrace to humanity.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne: Containing The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy ... [etc.] ; with a Life of the Author Written by Himself
“Look into the world--how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man's affliction, taking shelterbehind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.”
Source: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts
“Injuries come only from the heart.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne ...
“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.”
“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.”
Source: THE
“When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,--prays without ceasing 'till his imagination is heated,--fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbancesof an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for [the] workings [of God].”
“The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,--where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.”
Source: The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author
“Solomon'sexcess became an insult upon the privileges of mankind; for by the same plan of luxury, which made it necessary to have forty thousand stalls of horses,--he had unfortunately miscalculated his other wants, and so had seven hundred wives....
Wise--deluded man!”
“I am persuaded ... that both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.”
Source: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. And A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy ... With Life of the Author by Sir Walter Scott, Portrait, and Outline Wood Engravings After Thomas Stothard
“The truth and regularity of a character is not, in justice, to be looked upon as broken, from any one single act or omission which may seem a contradiction to it:Mthe best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities.”
“We often think ourselves inconsistent creatures, when we are the furthest from it, and all the variety of shapes and contradictory appearances we put on, are in truth but so many different attempts to gratify the same governing appetite.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Laurence Sterne (Illustrated)
“Almost one half of our time is spent in telling and hearing evil of one another ... and every hour brings forth something strange and terrible to fill up our discourse and our astonishment.”
Source: Works ...
“The sad vicissitude of things.”
“People who drink too much, health, and greedy. Hoard a treasure we do not like.”
“Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.”
“I take a simple view of life. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it.”
“Only the brave know how to forgive... a coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.”
“Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.”
“For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.”
“In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.”
“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.”
Source: The works of Laurence Sterne
