Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s line weaponizes the Protestant work ethic against the very people who most love to brandish it: dutiful improvers, moral accountants, the readers who treat books like medicine. On its face, it’s a scolding maxim - if reading doesn’t make you better, you might as well be unconscious. But coming from the author of Tristram Shandy, a novel that famously wastes time on purpose, the sentence lands as a sly, self-canceling joke. Sterne pretends to endorse utilitarian reading while quietly exposing how joyless and authoritarian that standard is.

The subtext is a wink at a culture that was beginning to professionalize virtue. The 18th century saw an expanding reading public, rising middle-class respectability, and a booming market for “improving” literature: conduct books, sermons, moral tales. Sterne knew the social pressure baked into that marketplace. To read “properly” was to perform seriousness. His phrasing - “asleep,” “regulate,” “conduct” - mimics the language of discipline, suggesting that the improvement regime turns reading into a kind of spiritual factory work.

The quote also protects the novel as a genre under suspicion. Fiction was often accused of being frivolous or corrupting, especially for young and female readers. Sterne’s mock severity dares critics to agree, then traps them: if only moral utility justifies reading, the imagination itself becomes guilty until proven “useful.” The sting is that Sterne’s own art thrives on digression, pleasure, and moral ambiguity - reminding us that literature can refine conduct precisely by refusing to behave.