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Digressions incontestably are the sunshine they are the life, the soul of reading.

Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Digressions
Sunshine
Reading
Soul
Life

More quotes by Laurence Sterne

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A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.
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Almost one half of our time is spent in telling and hearing evil of one another ... and every hour brings forth something strange and terrible to fill up our discourse and our astonishment.
Laurence Sterne
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Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy.
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Ten cooks' shops! ...and all within three minutes' driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world ...had said - Come, let us all go live at Paris: the French love good eating - they are all gourmands - we shall rank high.
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There is one sweet lenitive at least for evils, which nature holds out so I took it kindly at her hands, and fell asleep.
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Any one may do a casual act of good-nature but a continuation of them shows it a part of the temperament.
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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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When the affections so kindly break loose, Joy, is another name for Religion.
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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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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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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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
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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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Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
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 best friends in the world may differ sometimes.
Laurence Sterne
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Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
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A man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad.
Laurence Sterne
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To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.
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An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.
Laurence Sterne