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

Laurence Sterne Quotes

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

— Laurence Sterne

What persons are by starts they are by nature.

— Laurence Sterne

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman’s task into another man’s hand.

— Laurence Sterne

I am sick as a horse.

— Laurence Sterne

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?

— Laurence Sterne

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

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

— Laurence Sterne

If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of health, of coronets and mitres, is only evil as they occasion sorrow; take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.

— Laurence Sterne

Freethinkers are generally those who never think at all.

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

It is sweet to feel by what fine spun threads our affections are drawn together.

— Laurence Sterne

That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the bst – I’m sure it is the most religious – for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

— Laurence Sterne

How frequently is the honesty and integrity of a man disposed of by a smile or shrug! How many good and generous actions have been sunk into oblivion by a distrustful look, or stamped With the imputation of proceeding from bad motives, by a mysterious and seasonable whisper!

— Laurence Sterne

A good simile, – as concise as a king’s declaration of love.

— Laurence Sterne

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

— Laurence Sterne

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

We may imitate the Deity in all His attributes; but mercy is the only one in which we can pretend to equal Him. We cannot, indeed, give like God; but surely we may forgive like Him.

— Laurence Sterne

Is it not an amazing thing, that men shall attempt to investigate the mystery of the redemption, when, at the same time that it is propounded to us as an article of faith solely, we are told that “the very angels have desired to pry into it in vain”?

— Laurence Sterne

Probably Providence has implanted peevishness and ill-temper in sick and old persons, in compassion to the friends or relations who are to survive; as it must naturally lessen the concern they might otherwise feel for their loss.

— Laurence Sterne

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

— Laurence Sterne
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