Quotes from Laurence Sterne

Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket?

Do you understand the theory of that affair? replied my father.   Not I, quoth my uncle.   Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬But you have some ideas, said my father, of what you talk about.—   No more than my horse, replied my uncle Toby.

In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.

A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis like reading himself and not the book .

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

First, Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed.

I am pursuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.

But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!—by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu'd—be-pictured,—be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it.

The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature;- the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.