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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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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Every
Standing
Men
Either
Like
Fire
Wick
Literature
Candle
Ends
Provided
Certain
Observation
May
Sufficient
Great
Pity
More quotes by 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
A man who values a good night's rest will not lie down with enmity in his heart, if he can help it.
Laurence Sterne
We lose the right of complaining sometimes, by denying something, but this often triples its force.
Laurence Sterne
Tis no extravagant arithmetic to say, that for every ten jokes, thou hast got an hundred enemies and till thou hast gone on, and raised a swarm of wasps about thine ears, and art half stung to death by them, thou wilt never be convinced it is so.
Laurence Sterne
If a man has a right to be proud of anything, it is of a good action done as it ought to be, without any base interest lurking at the bottom of it.
Laurence Sterne
It is not in the power of every one to taste humor, however he may wish it it is the gift of God! and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him.
Laurence Sterne
I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.
Laurence Sterne
There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.
Laurence Sterne
All womankind, from the highest to the lowest love jokes the difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut and there is no knowing that, but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field, by raising or letting down their breeches, till we hit the mark.
Laurence Sterne
The world is ashamed of being virtuous.
Laurence Sterne
Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery, said I, still thou art a bitter draught.
Laurence Sterne
A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size, take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one.
Laurence Sterne
'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.
Laurence Sterne
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
How many thousands of [lives] are there every year that comes cast away, (in all civilized countries at least)--and consider'd asnothing but common air, in competition of an hypothesis.
Laurence Sterne
I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
Laurence Sterne
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
When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his HOBBY-HORSE grows head- strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion.
Laurence Sterne
Digressions incontestably are the sunshine they are the life, the soul of reading.
Laurence Sterne
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.
Laurence Sterne
