Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s line captures the Enlightenment’s favorite dirty secret: reason may get the last word, but passion writes most of the script. The phrasing turns our inner life into a kind of crowded theater - “constantly in a frenzy” - where feelings and “principals” (his old spelling of “principles”) don’t stand like marble statues so much as jitter like actors waiting for their cue. It’s not a triumphant hymn to rationality; it’s a sly diagnosis of how unstable morality becomes once it’s forced to share the stage with desire, vanity, appetite, fear.

The bite is in the pivot: passion and principles don’t calm down by being defeated; they “begin to shift and waver” when we “return to reason.” Reason isn’t depicted as an engine that powers virtue but as a cold light that makes our convictions look provisional. In Sterne’s world - the world of Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey - people don’t hold principles; they improvise them, often retrofitting ethics to whatever the heart has already chosen. The “return” suggests reason is not our default setting but an after-visit, a late arrival after the messy business of living has already started.

Context matters: Sterne writes amid a culture that prized rational self-command while also luxuriating in “sensibility,” the status-bearing performance of feeling. His intent is to puncture the moral confidence of both camps. Passion is chaotic, yes, but the real embarrassment is that reason doesn’t stabilize us; it exposes how negotiable our “principals” were all along.