Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s line glides in with the calm authority of a natural law, then quietly destabilizes the melodrama we usually attach to suffering. “Pain and pleasure” aren’t framed as moral rewards or punishments; they’re treated like weather. By pairing them with “light and darkness,” he strips both states of their courtroom drama and recasts them as a cycle you can’t litigate your way out of. The verb “succeed” does sly double-duty: it means “follow,” but it also whispers “prevail,” teasing the idea that what comes next always feels like it wins.

The intent is less consolation than perspective. Sterne isn’t promising that pleasure will redeem pain, or that darkness has a narrative purpose. He’s arguing that human experience is sequential, not tidy. Relief arrives, then disappears. Misery does the same. That rhythm, not any single feeling, is the real constant.

Context matters: Sterne wrote in the 18th-century novel’s great pivot toward interior life, where bodily sensation, mood, and sentiment become legitimate subjects. In Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, he’s famously suspicious of straight lines and clean lessons; his narrators detour, digress, contradict themselves. This sentence is the anti-climax philosophy of that style: an almost scientific observation delivered with a faintly comic deflation. If you’re waiting for experience to resolve into meaning, Sterne’s shrug is that it mostly resolves into the next thing.