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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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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

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Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,--and has wit in it, and instruction too,--if we can but find it out.
Laurence Sterne
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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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What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation! And unbutton another!
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Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.
Laurence Sterne
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Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.
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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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
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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.
Laurence Sterne
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...beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.
Laurence Sterne
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I take a simple view of life. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it.
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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Titles of honour are like the impressions on coin — which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current.
Laurence Sterne
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If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of health, of coronets and mitres, is only evil as they occasion sorrow take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.
Laurence Sterne
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Philosophy has a fine saying for everything.-For Death it has an entire set.
Laurence Sterne
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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
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My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.
Laurence Sterne
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Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
Laurence Sterne
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What persons are by starts they are by nature.
Laurence Sterne
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An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.
Laurence Sterne
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Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! Eternal fountain of our feelings! 'tis here I trace thee and this is thy divinity which stirs within me...All comes from thee, great-great SENSORIUM of the world!
Laurence Sterne