Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s “simple view” is a performance of simplicity, the kind of plainspoken posture that makes you suspect a wink is coming. This is the novelist of Tristram Shandy, a book that turns digression into a worldview; when he says life is just “keep your eyes open and get on with it,” he’s compressing the Enlightenment’s appetite for observation and experience into a brisk moral motto, then daring you to notice how inadequate it is.

The line works because it’s both advice and provocation. “Keep your eyes open” sounds like Protestant practicality, but in Sterne’s hands it’s also a writer’s commandment: attend to the absurd details, the social theater, the body, the misfires of language. Seeing becomes a kind of survival skill in a world run on manners, accident, and self-deception. Then “get on with it” lands like a shove. No dreamy metaphysics, no grand narrative of destiny - just motion. It’s an anti-romantic stance before Romanticism fully arrives: less “find yourself,” more “don’t flatter yourself.”

Context matters. Mid-18th-century Britain is a culture of sermons, sensibility, and expanding print - public life is noisy, opinionated, and increasingly commercial. Sterne, a clergyman-novelist who knew how to sell feeling while mocking it, offers a credo that doubles as critique: you can’t control the plot, but you can control your attention and your next step. The subtext is bluntly modern: clarity and momentum beat obsession, even if the clarity is partly a pose.