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What persons are by starts they are by nature.

Laurence Sterne

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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Nature
Persons
Starts
Impulse

More quotes by Laurence Sterne

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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.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
Laurence Sterne
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Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.
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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Freethinkers are generally those who never think at all.
Laurence Sterne
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Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.
Laurence Sterne
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The way to fame, is like the way to heaven,--through much tribulation.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
Laurence Sterne
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There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman whilst she is making sausages.
Laurence Sterne
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A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.
Laurence Sterne
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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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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.
Laurence Sterne
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I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon?
Laurence Sterne
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Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints - without working one - one single miracle with them?
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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Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy.
Laurence Sterne
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For every ten jokes you acquire a hundred enemies.
Laurence Sterne
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We are born to trouble and we may depend upon it, whilst we live in this world, we shall have it, though with intermissions.
Laurence Sterne
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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.
Laurence Sterne