Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne takes a scalpel to the social ladder and shows it doesn’t bleed meaning. The line turns on a sly, almost theatrical lament ("Alas!") that signals what follows isn’t a pious sermon so much as a wink at the audience: we already know how prestige performs, and we keep buying tickets anyway. His central move is a deliberately absurd measurement. Grandeur can no more add to happiness than it can add a cubit to your height. Status is reduced to physics: fixed bones, fixed psyche. The joke lands because it punctures the era’s most expensive illusion - that external elevation produces internal enlargement.

The intent is moral, but the method is satiric. Sterne doesn’t argue that wealth and rank are evil; he implies they’re irrelevant to the core problem. "Principles of contentment" aren’t moods, they’re principles: habits of mind, a practiced inner economy. If those aren’t "within us", then grandeur becomes decorative rather than transformative, a costume that can’t rewrite the actor.

Context matters. Sterne is writing in an 18th-century Britain obsessed with station, patronage, and polite display - a world where being seen correctly could matter as much as being good. As a novelist attuned to vanity and self-deception, he frames happiness not as a reward delivered by society but as a competence, almost a craft. The subtext is bracingly modern: the chase for upgrades is endless because it’s trying to solve an interior problem with exterior tools.