Laurence Sterne Quotes

Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything.

Dear sensibility! Source in exhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!

God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.

Hail, ye small sweet courtesies of life.

If ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another.

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

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘tis all barren.

As an Englishman does not travel to see Englishmen, I retired to my room.

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

This sad vicissitude of things.

A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath’d at the same time.

Everything presses on – whilst thou art twisting that lock, – see! It grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.

‘A soldier,’ cried my uncle Toby, interrupting the corporal, ‘is no more exempt from saying a foolish thing, Trim, than a man of letters.’ – ‘But not so often, an’ please your honour,’ replied the corporal.

And who are you? Said he. – Don’t puzzle me, said I.

Now hang it! quoth I, as I look’d towards the French coast – a man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad.

My brother Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs Wad man. Then he will never, quoth my father, lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.

There is a North-west passage to the intellectual World.

‘There is no terror, brother Toby, in its looks, but what it borrows from groans and convulsions – and the blowing of noses, and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains, in a dying man’s room – Strip it of these, what is it?’ – ’Tis better in battle than in bed,’ said my uncle Toby.

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 through its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.

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