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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
Right
Adds
Triumph
Absurd
Add
Defeat
Shame
Positiveness
Wrong
Lessens
Happiness
Foibles

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Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning, humility, and virtue--that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman's life both glorious and happy.
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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.
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People who drink too much, health, and greedy. Hoard a treasure we do not like.
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Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
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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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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.
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The most affluent may be stripped of all, and find his worldly comforts, like so many withered leaves, dropping from him.
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Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, that the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.
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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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Only the brave know how to forgive it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.
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It appears an extraordinary thing to me, that since there is such a diabolical spirit in the depravity of human nature, as persecution for difference of opinion in religious tenets, there never happened to be any inquisition, any auto da fe, any crusade, among the Pagans.
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There are many ways of inducing sleep--the thinking of purling rills, or waving woods reckoning of numbers droppings from a wet sponge fixed over a brass pan, etc. But temperance and exercise answer much better than any of these succedaneums.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
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There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.
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The way to fame, is like the way to heaven,--through much tribulation.
Laurence Sterne
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Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.
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...beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.
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The best friends in the world may differ sometimes.
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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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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