Education Quote by Laurence Sterne

Solitude gets pitched as deprivation; Sterne flips it into training. The line is built like a moral aphorism, but its real persuasion comes from the muscular verbs: the mind "gains strength" and "learns to lean". That second phrase is slyly physical, almost architectural. A mind that leans on others is a mind propped up; a mind that leans on itself becomes load-bearing. Sterne isn’t romanticizing loneliness so much as advertising self-reliance as a practiced skill, not a personality trait you’re born with.

The subtext carries an Enlightenment-era suspicion of noise: society as distraction, company as contamination, conversation as a soft narcotic that lets you outsource your thinking. In a culture thick with salons, coffeehouses, and the performance of wit, solitude becomes the one space where the self isn’t edited in real time for an audience. Sterne, a novelist fascinated by digression and interior movement, is implicitly defending the private workshop where thoughts can be unfinished, contradictory, and still productive.

There’s also a quieter, sharper edge: dependence is not just emotional, it’s epistemic. If you always think in public, your ideas start arriving pre-shaped by approval, fashion, and the fear of seeming dull. Solitude, here, is less escape than resistance - a way to recover authorship of your own attention. Sterne’s intent isn’t to sanctify isolation; it’s to argue that autonomy has a gym, and it’s called being alone long enough to hear yourself without the crowd’s cue cards.