Date: 1760-7

Self-love may "hang the least bias upon the judgment."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Could no such thing as favour and affection enter this sacred Court [of Conscience]:--Did Wit disdain to take a bribe in it;--or was asham'd to shew its face as an advocate for an unwarrantable enjoyment?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Or, lastly, were we assured, that Interest stood always unconcern'd whilst the cause was hearing,--and that passion never got into the judgment-seat, and pronounc'd sentence in the stead of reason, which is supposed always to preside and determine upon the case."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Conscience may be "engaged at home, talking loud against petty larceny, and executing vengeance upon some such puny crimes as his fortune and rank in life secured him against all temptation of committing."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"What a conjuncture was here lost! ... my uncle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world;--his head like a smoak-jack;--the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"As for my uncle Toby, his smoak-jack had not made a dozen revolutions, before he fell asleep also. "

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"There are others again, who will draw a man's character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations; --but this often gives a very incorrect out-line,--unless, indeed, you take a sketch of his repletions too; and by correcting one drawing from the other, compound one good ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Whether Susannah, by taking her hand too suddenly from off the corporal's shoulder, (by the whisking about of her passions)--broke a little the chain of his reflections--"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]nd this leads me to the affair of Whiskers--but, by what chain of ideas--I leave as a legacy in mort main to Prudes and Tartufs, to enjoy and make the most of."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)