Laurence Sterne Quotes

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.

Respect for ourselves guides our morals; respect for others guides our manners

Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything.

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Human nature is the same in all professions.

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.

We don't love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them

I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:

…so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,--pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?

Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests himself in everything.

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.

...For every ten jokes - thou hast got an hundred enemies...

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

« Je suis persuadé que chaque fois qu'un homme sourit et mieux encore lorsqu'il rit, il ajoute quelque chose à la durée de sa vie.»

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.

Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story...

I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.

Alas, poor YORICK!

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! Eternal fountain of our feelings! 'tis here I trace thee and this is thy divinity which stirs within me...All comes from thee, great-great SENSORIUM of the world!

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimulates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

The loneliness is the mother of wisdom.

The desire for knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

[O]f all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

—My brother Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman. —Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all,—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me: she look’d down—a silence of some moments followed.

Memiliki rasa hormat pada diri sendiri akan membimbing moral kita, Memiliki rasa hormat terhadap orang lain akan menjaga sikap sopan santun kita.

All womankind, from the highest to the lowest love jokes; the difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut; and there is no knowing that, but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field, by raising or letting down their breeches, till we hit the mark.

There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, -- or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.

—all I can say of the matter, is—That he has either a pumkin for his head—or a pippin for his heart,—and whenever he is dissected 'twill be found so.

It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything. ~Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections—If I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to—I would court their shade, and greet them kindly for their protection—I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desert: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn, and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them.

—I won't go about to argue the point with you,—'tis so,—and I am persuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, "That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.

Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.

Crack, crack—crack, crack—crack, crack—so this is Paris! quoth I (continuing in the same mood)—and this is Paris!—humph!—Paris! cried I, repeating the name the third time— The first, the finest, the most brilliant— —The streets however are nasty; But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells—crack, crack—crack, crack—

Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket?

Now don't let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them,—imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.

So that whether the pain of a wound in the groin (cæteris paribus) is greater than the pain of a wound in the knee—or Whether the pain of a wound in the knee is not greater than the pain of a wound in the groin—are points which to this day remain unsettled.

I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.

I like subordination, quoth my uncle Toby...

And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?--Oh ! 'tis out of all plumb, my lord,--quite an irregular thing!

Great wits jump

In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.

Endless is the search of truth.

We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it

The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature;- the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it

ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing.

What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone, which you know, madam, is little more than a whisper?

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

was all uniformity;—he was systematical, and, like all systematic reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis.

The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:—Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?

I define a nose, as follows,—intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition.—For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs,—I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.

What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life,—or rather what were the opinions which floated in the brains of other people concerning it, was a thought which too much floated in his own, and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have been sound asleep.

Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight.

  Do you understand the theory of that affair? replied my father.   Not I, quoth my uncle.   —But you have some ideas, said my father, of what you talk about.—   No more than my horse, replied my uncle Toby.

Button-holes! there is something lively in the very idea of 'em - and trust me, when I get amongst 'em - you gentry with great beards - look as grave as you will - I'll make merry work with my button-holes - I shall have 'em all to myself - 'tis a maiden subject - I shall run foul of no man's wisdom or fine sayings in it.

—So much motion, continues he, (for he was very corpulent)—is so much unquietness; and so much of rest, by the same analogy, is so much of heaven. Now, I (being very thin) think differently; and that so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy—and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil—

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—

A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis like reading himself and not the book.

I said, Quiet!" Tiffany was so much startled by this peremptory reminder that she gasped, and stood staring up at the Nonesuch as though she could not believe that he was speaking not to his cousin, but actually to her. She drew in her breath audibly, and clenched her hands. Miss Trent cast a look of entreaty at sir Waldo, but he ignored it. He strolled up to the infuriated beauty, and pushed up her chin. "Now, you may listen to me, my child!" he said sternly. "You are becoming a dead bore, and I don't tolerate bores. Neither do I tolerate noisy tantrums. Unless you want to be soundly smacked, enact me no ill-bred scenes!" There was a moment's astonished silence. Laurence broke it, seizing his cousin's hand, and fervently shaking it. "I knew you was a right one!" he declared. "A great gun, Waldo! Damme, a Trojan!

—for though he never after went to the house, yet he never met Bridget in the village, but he would either nod or wink, or smile, or look kindly at her,—or (as circumstances directed), he would shake her by the hand,—or ask her lovingly how she did,—or would give her a ribban,—and now and then, though never but when it could be done with decorum, would give Bridget a—

Melek de değiliz; keşke olsak, ama insanlara birer beden giydirilmiştir, ve bizleri hayal güçlerimiz yönetir - ne şenlikli bir şölen. ... Gözler daha zarif bir okşama sağlar ve düş gücümüz üzerinde sözler kadar kolay ifadelendirilemeyen bir şeyler bırakır,-ya da,-bazen,var olanı da yok ederler.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all, so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all. The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

... yanlış yanlıştır, nerede olursa olsun, nereye düşerse düşsün, ister bir ondalık, ister bir libre ağırlığında olsun, doğruya ölümcül bir darbe vurur ve onu karanlık kuyusunun dibine mahkûm eder - ister kelebeğin kanadındaki toz zerreciği kadar, ister güneşin, ayın ve bütün yıldızların ekseni büyüklüğünde olsun, yanlış yanlıştır. Bu yeterince önemsenmediği ve gerek kamusal, gerekse düşünsel sorunlarda gereğince uygulanmadığı için, dünyadaki pek çok şey şirazesinden çıkmıştır.

Yet there is hardly a more appealing description of the Enlightenment outlook on life and learning than a single sentence in a popular novel of the day, A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne. What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

There is not an oath, or at least a curse amongst them, which has not been copied over and over again out of Ernulphus a thousand times but, like all other copies, how infinitely short of the force and spirit of the original! It is thought to be no bad oath - and by itself passes very well - "God damn you" - Set it beside Ernulphus's - "God Almighty the Father damn you - God the Son damn you - God the Holy Ghost damn you" - you see 'tis nothing. - There is an orientality in his, we cannot rise up to.

Cada uno hablará de la feria según le haya ido a su mercancía.

İnsan hayatı nedir ki! Bir taraftan bir tarafa - bir kederden ötekine geçmek değil mi? - bir derdin üstüne kilit vurup - bir başkasını açmak!

Eğer dünya bir TÜZEL KİŞİ gibi dava edilebilseydi,-babam onu mahkemeye verip icabına bakardı.

...biz varsak, ölüm yok;-ölüm varsa-biz yokuz.

... bence bu gezegen ötekilerin artık ve kırpıntılarından imal edilmiş olmalı...

İşte senin yanlışın da burada, diye karşılık verirdi babam - çünkü Foro Scientiae (bilim alanı)'de CİNAYET diye bir şey yoktur, yalnızca ÖLÜM vvardır kardeşim.

Je weniger wirkliches Wissen, desto mehr Hitze und Aufregung.

Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk—so little to the stock? Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track—for ever at the same pace? Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints—without working one—one single miracle with them?

Sözcükleri telaffuz ettiğim anda, kalp bölgesinin civarındaki telleri titreştiren bir çaba hissedebiliyordum.-Beyin bunu kaydetmedi.-Zaten genellikle bu ikisi birbiriyle pek anlaşamaz.

Now—Ten thousand, and ten thousand times ten thousand (for matter and motion are infinite) are the ways by which a hat may be dropped upon the ground, without any effect.—Had he flung it, or thrown it, or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted, or let it slip or fall in any possible direction under heaven,—or in the best direction that could be given to it,—had he dropped it like a goose—like a puppy—like an ass—or in doing it, or even after he had done, had he looked like a fool,—like a ninny—like a nicompoop—it had fail'd, and the effect upon the heart had been lost.

Kendi payıma, işe yeni başlamış biri olarak, bu konuda pek bir şey bilmiyorum - ama kanımca, kitap yazmak, herkes ne derse desin, bir şarkı mırıldanmaya benzer-bir kere ahengi tutturun yeter.

I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained “it could not get out.”—I look’d up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention. In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage.—“I can’t get out—I can’t get out,” said the starling. I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach’d it, with the same lamentation of its captivity.—“I can’t get out,” said the starling.—God help thee! said I, but I’ll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turn’d about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces.—I took both hands to it. The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, press’d his breast against it, as if impatient.—I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty.—“No,” said the starling—“I can’t get out—I can’t get out,” said the starling.

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all, who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns you.

Babam bir hastalığın teşhisini her zaman tedavisiyle birlikte koyardı. "Eğer ben mutlak hükümdar olsaydım... metropolümün her caddesine ortalıkta dolaşanlara oraya ne halt etmeye geldiklerini soracak bir yargıç tayin ederdim - ve eğer, adil ve birtaraf bir dava sonunda, evlerini bırakıp da çanta-çıkın, çoluk-çocuk, buralara gelmelerinin nedenini makul bir biçimde açıklayamıyorlarsa, kolculara teslim edip, tıpkı serseriler gibi, yasal yerleşim bölgelerine geri gönderirdim. Böylelikle de metropolün kendi ağırlığı altında ezilmesini önlemiş olurdum...

-Benim türümdeki yazarların ressamlarla paylaştıkları ortak bir ilke vardır. -Aslına tümüyle sadık kalarak kopyalamak resimlerimizin yeterince çarpıcı olmalarını engellediğinde, bizler ehven-i şeri (kötünün iyisini) seçer ve güzelliği ihlal etmektense hakikatı tahrif etmeyi (değiştirmeyi) yeğleriz.

—Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there ever was such a man—if not, there's an end of the matter.— Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise æra in which so great a man lived;—whether, for instance, before or after the patriarchs, &c.—to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all, is a little cruel,—'tis not doing as they would be done by—happen that as it —My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong with him, especially upon the first sally of his impatience—of wondering why he was begot,—wishing himself dead;—sometimes worse:—

A white bear! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to have seen one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one? Would I have seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?) If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then? If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? -Described? Have I never dreamed of one? Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth? - Is the white bear worth seeing? - - Is there no sin in it? - Is it better than a Black One?

But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!—by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu’d—be-pictured,—be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.

our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical) have, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that Aκμ4 of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off. When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of writings whatsoever;—the want of all kind of writing will put an end to all kind of reading;—and that in time, As war begets poverty, poverty peace,5——must, in course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,—and then——we shall have all to begin over again; or, in other words, be exactly where we started. ———Happy! thrice

My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of ——, was, I believe, one of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether 'twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life,—on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year,—as certain as ever the Sunday-night came,—to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands:—And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of,—he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month. It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head.

Gücüydü, çünkü doğası gereği güzel konuşurdu babam; zaafıydı, çünkü saat başı yeteneğini gösterebilmek için bir bahane arar, ne yapar eder dirayetli ya da zekice, ya da hınzırca bir şeyler söylemeyi başarırdı. ... Babam için dilini bağlayan herhangi bir lütuf ile dilini çözen herhangi bir bela arasında fark yoktu; çünkü mesela çektiği nutuktan duyduğu keyif on ise, başına gelen bela azami beş olmaktaydı-bu yüzden de her zaman en azından yarı yarıya galipti ve sanki bütün bunlar başına hiç gelmemişçesine yoluna devam ederdi.

...Vicdan, bir zamanlar kadir olan bu yönetici - içimize muktedir bir yargıç olarak yerleştirilmiş, üstelik de yaratıcımız tarafından adil ve hakşinas olarak tasarlanmış bu yetke, -bir dizi bedbaht nedenler ve engeller sonucu, olup bitenleri çoğu kez doğru dürüst algılayamaz ve görevini gereğince yerine getiremez. -Zaman zaman görevini kötüye kullandığı bile olur.-Bu yüzden de yetkisini tek başına kullanmasına izin verilmemelidir, kararlarında onu yönetecek değilse bile, ona yardımcı olacak bir ilkenin eşlik etmesi elzemdir.

... irfanımızın engin harmanının emekçileri ... çoğu ik'le ve tik'le biten daha elli dalda, son iki yüzyıldır ya da daha uzun bir süredir, mükemmeliyetinin o doruğuna doğru emekliyor. Son yedi yıl içindeki gelişmelere bakarak bir tahminde bulunabilirsek, bu doruk ise pek de uzaklarda olmamalı. Bu sonuç gerçekleştiğinde, umulur ki, her türlü yazı son bulacak; her türlü yazının son bulması her türlü okumayı yok edecek; ve zamanla, -her tür bilgi ortadan kalkacak, ve, ardından, her şeye yeni baştan başlamamız gerekecek. Bir başka deyişle, tam başladığımız yere geri döneceğiz.