Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Absurd
Add
Defeat
Shame
Positiveness
Wrong
Lessens
Happiness
Foibles
Right
Adds
Triumph

More quotes by Laurence Sterne

Image
Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.
Laurence Sterne
Image
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.
Laurence Sterne
Image
Patience cannot remove, but it can always dignify and alleviate, misfortune.
Laurence Sterne
Image
I never drink. I cannot do it, on equal terms with others. It costs them only one day but me three, the first in sinning, the second in suffering, and the third in repenting.
Laurence Sterne
Image
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
Image
'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.
Laurence Sterne
Image
There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman whilst she is making sausages.
Laurence Sterne
Image
Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest.
Laurence Sterne
Image
I had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame.
Laurence Sterne
Image
Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
Laurence Sterne
Image
The best friends in the world may differ sometimes.
Laurence Sterne
Image
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
Image
What persons are by starts they are by nature.
Laurence Sterne
Image
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
Image
The circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape--and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent, just as the case happens.
Laurence Sterne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The best hearts are ever the bravest.
Laurence Sterne
Image
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
Laurence Sterne
Image
Hail! the small courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which beget inclinations to love at first sight it is ye who open the door and let the stranger in.
Laurence Sterne