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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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Laurence Sterne
Age: 54 †
Born: 1713
Born: November 24
Died: 1768
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Novelist
Religious
Writer
Cured
Superstition
Skepticism
Superstitions
Sooner
Atheist
Ignorance

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Of all duties, prayer certainly is the sweetest and most easy.
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There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman whilst she is making sausages.
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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 had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame.
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A coward never forgives.
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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.
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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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When the affections so kindly break loose, Joy, is another name for Religion.
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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.
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What persons are by starts they are by nature.
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If a man has a right to be proud of anything, it is of a good action done as it ought to be, without any base interest lurking at the bottom of it.
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Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
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There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill-will: a word--a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object aimed at.
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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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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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How many thousands of [lives] are there every year that comes cast away, (in all civilized countries at least)--and consider'd asnothing but common air, in competition of an hypothesis.
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[I have] been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another.
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Human nature is the same in all professions.
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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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Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
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