We are born to trouble; and we may depend upon it, whilst we live in this world, we shall have it, though with intermissions.
Laurence SterneWhen, to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon that an ignorant and helpless creature shall be sacrificed, it is an easy matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with.
Laurence SterneConversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.
Laurence SterneCourtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.
Laurence Sterne