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The most accomplished way of using books is to serve them as some people do lords learn their titles and then brag of their acquaintance.

Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Learn
Brag
Book
Acquaintance
Way
Titles
People
Accomplished
Serve
Using
Books
Lord
Lords

More quotes by Laurence Sterne

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Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.
Laurence Sterne
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The brave only know how to forgive.
Laurence Sterne
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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
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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
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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
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Human nature is the same in all professions.
Laurence Sterne
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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
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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.
Laurence Sterne
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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
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The way to fame, is like the way to heaven,--through much tribulation.
Laurence Sterne
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There is not a greater paradox in nature,--than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.
Laurence Sterne
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The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.
Laurence Sterne
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The world is ashamed of being virtuous.
Laurence Sterne
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An English man does not travel to see English men.
Laurence Sterne
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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
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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
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The best hearts are ever the bravest.
Laurence Sterne
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Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions--tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece--must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?
Laurence Sterne
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People who drink too much, health, and greedy. Hoard a treasure we do not like.
Laurence Sterne
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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