Laurence Sterne

"The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"It is the nature of a man to love himself."

"Time is the rider that breaks youth."

"God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."

"A man is but the product of his thoughts."

"Laughter is the best and best-timed plaything of mankind."

"There is a secret magic about numbers."

"No body can conduct long in this toiling world without some friend."

"The heart wants what it wants."

"Every atom of us is alive."

"Writing when properly managed is but a different name for conversation."

"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."

"A man cannot govern himself, much less govern the state."

"The true use of travel is to regulate imagination by reality."

"It is the nature of an apology to heal."

"Great souls suffer in silence."

"We are not makers of history; we are made by history."

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should not know how to desire."

"No need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself."

"The sweetest music is the music of hope."

"There is no evil so great as that which surrounds us in the ordinary world."

"Knowledge is the only true religion."

"Nothing is ever lost or can be lost."

"The greatest pleasure of life is love."

"Friendship is the marriage of the soul."

"Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same."

"All science is the progressive discernment of pattern."

"Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light."

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles; meanwhile, within man is the soul of the whole."

"Art is the response to the demand for entertainment."