Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne turns “cant” into a verbal cudgel, and the sentence itself starts to feel like the thing it attacks: a rolling, self-amused performance that dares you to keep up. “Cant” here is more than hypocrisy; it’s the whole ecosystem of pious poses, fashionable opinions, and ready-made moral language that lets people sound principled without the inconvenience of principle. By stacking “cants” on “canted” in a “canting world,” Sterne satirizes how relentlessly this posture reproduces itself. Everyone is doing it; the air is thick with it.

The sly twist is the ranking. He grants that hypocrites are dreadful, then pivots to the “cant of criticism” as “most tormenting.” That’s not because criticism is uniquely evil, but because it’s uniquely invasive: it follows you. Hypocrisy can be ignored at a distance; criticism installs itself in your head. Sterne, a novelist steeped in digression and self-interruption, knew the special tyranny of the critical voice that polices tone, taste, and decorum. In an 18th-century literary culture where reviews, pamphlets, and salons could anoint or annihilate a work, “criticism” often masqueraded as disinterested judgment while really enforcing class-coded norms about what counts as “serious.”

The line’s comedy is also defensive. Sterne anticipates the critics by pre-labeling their objections as cant: not argument but ritualized scolding. It’s an author’s preemptive strike, delivered with enough wit that the reader laughs - and in laughing, takes his side against the professional killjoys.