Date: 1760-7

"But my father's mind took unfortunately a wrong turn in the investigation; running, like the hypercritic's, altogether upon the ringing of the bell and the rap upon the door,--measuring their distance,--and keeping his mind so intent upon the operation, as to have power to think of nothing else,...

— 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

"But so full is your head of these confounded works, that tho' my wife is this moment in the pains of labour,--and you hear her cry out,--yet nothing will serve you but to carry off the man-midwife."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"I would not, I would not, brother Toby, have my brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and of all the towns in Flanders with it."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"I was but ten years old when this happened;--but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation;--or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it;--or i...

— 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

"Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain; which, as he philosophised, formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho' to speak the truth, as so m...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"As for that certain, very thin, subtle, and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulae of the occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the ...

— 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)