"It is a great pity but tis certain from every day's observation of man, that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end provided there is a sufficient wick standing out"
About this Quote
Sterne is doing that thing he does best: taking a supposedly elevated subject - human nature - and yanking it down into the physical, the domestic, the faintly ridiculous. A man can be "set on fire like a candle" if there is "a sufficient wick standing out": the image is comic because it’s so literal, so household, so unromantic. People love to imagine themselves complex and self-directing; Sterne suggests we’re basically flammable, engineered for ignition. The joke lands because it’s not mystical. It’s mechanics.
The subtext is sharper than the metaphor’s cozy props. The "wick" is whatever protrudes: vanity, appetite, pride, wounded honor, lust, ambition, ideology. You don’t even need to know which end he means to imply; the ambiguity is part of the bite. We can be triggered through the head (ideas, rhetoric, belief) or the body (desire, hunger, fear). Either way, the problem isn’t the flame. It’s the preexisting design that invites it.
Context matters: Sterne’s 18th-century world was thick with moralizing systems that claimed to explain man as rational, improvable, and governable by principle. Sterne, the novelist, votes for observation over doctrine. "Every day's observation" is his credential: not sermons, not philosophy, but the recurring spectacle of people being easily provoked, easily consumed, and then calling it character. The pity is real, but it’s a pity delivered with a grin: we are, inconveniently, built to burn.
The subtext is sharper than the metaphor’s cozy props. The "wick" is whatever protrudes: vanity, appetite, pride, wounded honor, lust, ambition, ideology. You don’t even need to know which end he means to imply; the ambiguity is part of the bite. We can be triggered through the head (ideas, rhetoric, belief) or the body (desire, hunger, fear). Either way, the problem isn’t the flame. It’s the preexisting design that invites it.
Context matters: Sterne’s 18th-century world was thick with moralizing systems that claimed to explain man as rational, improvable, and governable by principle. Sterne, the novelist, votes for observation over doctrine. "Every day's observation" is his credential: not sermons, not philosophy, but the recurring spectacle of people being easily provoked, easily consumed, and then calling it character. The pity is real, but it’s a pity delivered with a grin: we are, inconveniently, built to burn.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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