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

Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Shift
Principal
Constantly
Begin
Return
Principals
Passion
Waver
Literature
Frenzy
Reason
Comeback

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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.
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What persons are by starts they are by nature.
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If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
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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.
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I had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame.
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Patience cannot remove, but it can always dignify and alleviate, misfortune.
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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.
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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.
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Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery, said I, still thou art a bitter draught.
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There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.
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Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
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Men tire themselves in the pursuit of sleep.
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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.
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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.
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Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
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We lose the right of complaining sometimes, by denying something, but this often triples its force.
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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.
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If time, like money, could be laid by while one was not using it, there might be some excuse for the idleness of half of the world, but yet not a full one. For even this would be such an economy as the living on a principal sum, without making it purchase interest.
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Go, poor devil, get thee gone! Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
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Digressions incontestably are the sunshine they are the life, the soul of reading.
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