Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Forgiveness gets recast here as an act of nerve, not niceness. Sterne flips the usual moral hierarchy: the “good” person isn’t the gentle soul who lets things slide, but the brave one who can stomach the psychological risk of releasing a grievance. That’s the sting in the line’s design. It refuses to treat forgiveness as an automatic virtue; it makes it a test of character under pressure.

The barb at “a coward never forgave” isn’t really about battlefield fear. It’s about the smaller, more familiar cowardice of self-protection: the need to keep an injury alive because it props up a story where you’re permanently right, permanently wronged, permanently owed. To forgive is to surrender a weapon. Resentment can feel like control, and Sterne understands that the person who can’t forgive is often the person most invested in the leverage of pain.

As an 18th-century novelist and cleric-adjacent satirist (best known for Tristram Shandy’s comic intelligence and moral seriousness), Sterne is working in a culture where “sensibility” was becoming fashionable: refined feeling as social capital. This line quietly mocks that performance. Forgiveness isn’t sentimental display; it’s inner fortitude. The ellipsis does real work too, a theatrical pause that turns the second clause into a verdict. Not in his nature: a cold, almost scientific dismissal. The subtext is uncomfortable on purpose: if you’re clinging to your grudge, it’s not proof of standards. It’s proof of fear.