Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sternewas an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He wrote the novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, and also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 November 1713
CountryIreland
strength wisdom loneliness
In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
motivational education business
The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
writing thinking talking
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
men skills luck
The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,--where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.
travel owing littles
Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.
men mind literature
When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage - that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.
change ideas literature
Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
reading winter sunshine
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
plato love-is men
To saya man is fallen in love,or that he is deeply in love,or up to the ears in love,and sometimes even over head and ears in it,carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,I hold to be damnable and heretical:and so much for that. Let love therefore be what it will,my uncleToby fell into it.
success pain light
Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.
motivational forgiveness bravery
Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.
kings men thinking
So long as a man rides his hobbyhorse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him - pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?
courage heart
The best hearts are ever the bravest.
death stress may
Whatever stress some may lay upon it, a death-bed repentance is but a weak and slender plank to trust our all on.