Top 180 Laurence Sterne Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

52. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

54. “Chance is the providence of adventurers.”

— Laurence Sterne

55. “I had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame.”

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

57. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

58. “O blessed Health! thou art above all gold and treasure; ’tis thou who enlargest the soul, and openest all its powers to receive instruction, and to relish virtue. He that has thee has little more to wish for, and he that is so wretched as to want thee, wants everything with thee.”

— Laurence Sterne

59. “It is a great pity but tis certain from every day’s observation of man, that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end provided there is a sufficient wick standing out.”

— Laurence Sterne

60. “Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.”

— Laurence Sterne

61. “A man who values a good night’s rest will not lie down with enmity in his heart, if he can help it.”

— Laurence Sterne

62. “I take a simple view of life. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it.”

— Laurence Sterne

63. “Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?”

— Laurence Sterne

64. “In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, – and at the same time.”

— Laurence Sterne

65. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

66. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

67. “Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints – without working one – one single miracle with them?”

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

69. “We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it.”

— Laurence Sterne

70. “Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.”

— Laurence Sterne

71. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

72. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

73. “The chaste mind, like a polished plane, may admit foul thoughts, without receiving their tincture.”

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

75. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

76. “Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.”

— Laurence Sterne

77. “There are many ways of inducing sleep – the thinking of purling rills, or waving woods; reckoning of numbers; droppings from a wet sponge fixed over a brass pan, etc. But temperance and exercise answer much better than any of these succedaneums.”

— Laurence Sterne

78. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

79. “Is this a fit time, said my father to himself, to talk of Pensions and Grenadiers?”

— Laurence Sterne

80. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

81. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

82. “An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.”

— Laurence Sterne

83. “I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his Author’s hands; be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.”

— Laurence Sterne

84. “Any one may do a casual act of good-nature; but a continuation of them shows it a part of the temperament.”

— Laurence Sterne

85. “So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.”

— Laurence Sterne

86. “Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.”

— Laurence Sterne

87. “An inward sincerity will of course influence the outward deportment; but where the one is wanting, there is great reason to suspect the absence of the other.”

— Laurence Sterne

88. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

90. “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.”

— Laurence Sterne

91. “Hail! the small courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which beget inclinations to love at first sight; it is ye who open the door and let the stranger in.”

— Laurence Sterne

92. “We lose the right of complaining sometimes, by denying something, but this often triples its force.”

— Laurence Sterne

93. “Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy.”

— Laurence Sterne

94. “Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.”

— Laurence Sterne

95. “Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.”

— Laurence Sterne

96. “Before an affliction is digested, consolation ever comes too soon; and after it is digested, it comes too late.”

— Laurence Sterne

97. “There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, – or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.”

— Laurence Sterne

98. “Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves.”

— Laurence Sterne

99. “For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.”

— Laurence Sterne

100. “The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright’s work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director’s artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain.”

— Laurence Sterne