Love Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne is defending a kind of moral persuasion that pretends not to be moralizing at all. For an 18th-century novelist, that matters: the era’s culture of sermons, conduct books, and rational “improvement” loved to speak in maxims. Sterne’s sly counterproposal is that wisdom doesn’t land as a command; it lands as an experience. If you want to change how people live, you don’t lecture their minds, you recruit their feelings.

The sentence is built like a quiet manifesto for the novel itself. “Groundwork of a story” suggests craft, not accident: plot and character are the foundation, the thing you lay down so the lesson can stand without showing its scaffolding. “Capture the heart” is almost predatory language, and that’s the point. Sterne implies that readers aren’t conquered by arguments but by attachment: sympathy for a fool, tenderness toward a sufferer, complicity with a charming liar. The “passions” aren’t a bug in the moral project; they’re the delivery system.

The subtext is also a gentle jab at Enlightenment faith in pure reason. Sterne isn’t anti-intellectual; he’s anti-naive about human psychology. We’re persuadable when we’re moved, not when we’re managed. Coming from the author of Tristram Shandy, a novel that constantly interrupts itself and toys with the reader, it’s especially pointed: storytelling’s power lies in how it entangles us. We learn because we feel first, and only afterward call it “wisdom.”