Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne sets up a perfectly reasonable, bourgeois anxiety about solitude, then lets it collapse under a single, sly line. The question is loaded with modern assumptions before modernity: that distance equals danger, that loneliness is a social failure, that a life “a mile from any habitation” must be explained like a defect. He piles on the measurements and the geography not to honor the hermit’s austerity, but to dramatize the interrogator’s panic. The comedy is that the speaker thinks he’s describing emptiness; the hermit hears a crowded neighborhood.

“Providence was his next-door neighbor” is a miniature act of tonal judo. It answers in the language of domestic intimacy - next door, neighbor - the very idiom of village life the question presumes is absent. Sterne’s intent isn’t to sermonize about faith so much as to puncture the arrogance of the worldly observer, who imagines he can quantify a soul’s situation with a mile-marker. The hermit’s reply is both devout and mischievous: it redefines “company” in a way that’s unarguable, because you can’t argue with someone’s metaphysics without revealing your own thinness.

Context matters: Sterne, the Anglican cleric-turned-novelist of Tristram Shandy, loves these quick reversals where piety and punchline share the same seat. In an 18th-century culture negotiating reason, sentiment, and religion, the hermit isn’t just a saintly antique. He’s a rhetorical instrument: a calm rebuke to the era’s fear that the self, left alone, becomes nothing. Here, alone becomes inhabited.