Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne skewers the polite fiction that travel is about broadening the mind when, in practice, it often functions as portable nationalism. “An English man does not travel to see English men” lands like a throwaway maxim, but it’s really a jab at the tourist who drags home culture as a souvenir while refusing the discomfort of actual difference. The line flatters English curiosity on the surface and indicts English insularity underneath: if you’re only seeking your own kind abroad, you’re not traveling, you’re relocating your bubble.

The phrasing matters. “English man” (split into two words) emphasizes identity as performance: a man whose Englishness is his main credential. Sterne isn’t praising cosmopolitanism in a dreamy way; he’s mocking the social type who treats foreign places as scenery and foreigners as props. The implied opposite is thornier: if you don’t travel to see Englishmen, you travel to see everyone else - and that “everyone else” isn’t just picturesque. It’s a challenge to English self-importance during a century when Britain’s reach was expanding and Englishness was becoming an export brand.

As a novelist and satirist, Sterne is also defending the novel’s own project: attention. Real travel (like good fiction) requires noticing people on their own terms, not filtering them through familiar mirrors. It’s comedy with teeth: a neat, confident sentence that exposes the anxious need to stay culturally unruffled, even while claiming the glamour of worldly experience.