Skip to content

Quotes from A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy — Laurence Sterne

1713–1768 Ireland

← All quotes by Laurence Sterne

23 quotes

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, 'Tis all barren!

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

A man who laughs will never be dangerous.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Man is false to himself and betrays his own succours ten times where nature does it once.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

The heart, in spite of the understanding, will always say too much.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments!

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

I think there is a fatality in it; I seldom go to the place I set out for.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me to the contrary.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Hail, ye small, sweet courtesies of life! for smooth do ye make the road of it.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

I was at peace with the world before, and this finish’d the treaty with myself.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

A man my good Sir, has seldom an offer of kindness to make to a woman, but she has a presentiment of it some moments before.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage however, that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

They order, said I, this matter better in France.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

’Tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of Nature, and those affections which arise out of her, which make us love each other,—and the world, better than we do.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Tant pis and tant mieux, being two of the great hinges in French conversation, a stranger would do well to set himself right in the use of them before he gets to Paris.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

That grave people hate love for the name’s sake;—
That selfish people hate it for their own;—
Hypocrites for heaven’s;—

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

There is one sweet lenitive at least for evils, which Nature holds out to us: so I took it kindly at her hands, and fell asleep.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Laurence Sterne (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.