Date: 1760-7

"[I]n the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for [the biographer];--for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The gifts and endowments of wit and judgment may "be poured down warm as each of us could bear it,--scum and sediment an' all; (for I would not have a drop lost) into these veral receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains,--in such sort, that...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgement are, like "two knobbs" on the back of a chair, "the highest and most ornamental parts of" and "both made and fitted to go together, in order as we say in all such cases of duplicated embellishments,--to answer one another."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Blessed is the man whose heart hath not condemn'd him; whether he be rich, or whether he be poor, if he have a good heart (a heart thus guided and informed) he shall at all times rejoice in a chearful countenance; his mind shall tell him more than seven watch-men that sit above upon a tower on h...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"The blood and spirits of Le Fever, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart,--rallied back"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"What a cursed lyar! for I am sick as a horse, quoth I, already--what a brain!--upside down!--hey dey! the cells are broke loose one into another, and the blood, and the lymph, and the nervous juices, with the fix'd and volatile salts, are all jumbled into one mass--good g---! every thing turns r...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"I would not, brother Toby, continued my father,--I declare I would not have my head so full of curtins and horn-works."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Now, as it was plain to my father, that all souls were by nature equal,--and that the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding, --was from no original sharpness or bluntness of one thinking substance above or below another,--but arose merely from the lucky or unl...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"The very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tad-pole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,--or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, s...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"What, therefore, seem'd the least liable to objections of any, was, that the chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued,--was in, or near, the cerebellum,--or rather some-where a...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)