"One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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