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)

Date: 1760-7

"But how great was his apprehension, when he further understood, that this force, acting upon the very vertex of the head, not only injured the brain itself or cerebrum,--but that it necessarily squeez'd and propell'd the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate seat of the unders...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Angels and Ministers of grace defend us! cried my father,--can any soul withstand this shock?--No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and tatter'd as we see it; and that so many of our best heads are no better than a puzzled skein of silk,--all perplexity,--all confusion within side."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"It wonderfully explain'd and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic genius, and that sprightlier turn, and a more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sun-shine, &c.--which, for aught he knew, mig...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)