There is no such thing as real happiness in life. The justest definition that was ever given of it was “a tranquil acquiescence under an agreeable delusion” – I forget where.
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume – and no farther than to my first day’s life – ‘tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it – on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back –.
It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one...
Now don’t let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them, – imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.
Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket?
Great wits jump.
Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight.
And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about? – Oh ! ’tis out of all plumb, my lord, – quite an irregular thing!
In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, – and at the same time.
I like subordination, quoth my uncle Toby...
To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining parts of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, ’tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.
La seriedad es un continente misterioso del cuerpo que sirve para ocultar los defectos de la mente.
First, Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed.
Let love therefore be what it will, my Uncle Toby fell into it – And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation so wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet, anything in this world more concupiscible than widow Wadman.
And in this, Sir, I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you was able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page, – I would tear it out of my book.
I have begun a new book, on purpose that I might have room enough to explain the nature of the perplexities in which my uncle Toby was involved, from the many discourses and interrogations about the siege of Namur, where he received his wound.
We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it.
The desire of life and health is implanted in man’s nature;- the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it.
But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it! – by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu’d – be-pictured, – be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.
Je weniger wirkliches Wissen, desto mehr Hitze und Aufregung.
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; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;.