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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

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Others
Thirds
Three
Terms
Cannot
Cost
Repenting
Firsts
Drink
Intemperance
First
Equal
Sinning
Never
Second
Repent
Term
Costs
Suffering
Third

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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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The world is ashamed of being virtuous.
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I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
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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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People who drink too much, health, and greedy. Hoard a treasure we do not like.
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Precedents are the disgrace of legislation. They are not wanted to justify right measures, are absolutely insufficient to excuse wrong ones. They can only be useful to heralds, dancing masters, and gentlemen ushers.
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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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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.
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If time, like money, could be laid by while one was not using it, there might be some excuse for the idleness of half of the world, but yet not a full one. For even this would be such an economy as the living on a principal sum, without making it purchase interest.
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An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.
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'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.
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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.
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Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
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Vanity bids all her sons be brave, and all her daughters chaste and courteous.
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Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.
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Digressions incontestably are the sunshine they are the life, the soul of reading.
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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.
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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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Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.
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In solitude the mind gains strength, and learns to lean upon herself in the world it seeks or accepts of a few treacherous supports--the feigned compassion of one, the flattery of a second, the civilities of a third, the friendship of a fourth--they all deceive, and bring the mind back to retirement, reflection, and books.
Laurence Sterne