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'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.

Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
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Obstinacy
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Human nature is the same in all professions.
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Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy.
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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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Simplicity is the great friend to nature, and if I would be proud of anything in this silly world, it should be of this honest alliance.
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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.
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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.
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There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let penetrating eye at once into a man's soul and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, --or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.
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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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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.
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Heaven be their resource who have no other but the charity of the world, the stock of which, I fear, is no way sufficient for the many great claims which are hourly made upon it.
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Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
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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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For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.
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Patience cannot remove, but it can always dignify and alleviate, misfortune.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
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In all unmerciful actions, the worst of men pay this compliment at least to humanity, as to endeavour to wear as much of the appearance of it, as the case will well let them.
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?
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We lose the right of complaining sometimes, by denying something, but this often triples its force.
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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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