Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Health, in Sterne's hands, becomes less a virtue than a form of small-minded accounting. The jab lands because it flips the moral script: the supposedly disciplined caretaker is recast as a miser, a figure of vice in 18th-century imagination, clutching coins in the dark. Sterne's move is slyly economic. If life is a treasury, then health is capital, but capital is only meaningful when it circulates - in pleasure, risk, appetite, contact. Hoarding it turns prudence into cowardice.

The subtext is a broader satire of self-denial dressed up as responsibility. "Always taking care" hints at compulsion, not wisdom: an obsessive vigilance that becomes its own kind of illness. Sterne isn't arguing against medicine or moderation; he's mocking the personality that treats the body as a fragile asset to be protected rather than a vehicle for experience. The sting comes from "never spirit enough to enjoy": enjoyment isn't just indulgence, it's courage. To live is to spend.

Context matters. Sterne wrote in an era fascinated by sensibility, nerves, regimen, and the emerging culture of polite self-management. His fiction (especially Tristram Shandy) delights in human messiness and the futility of controlling it. This line reads like an early warning about a modern temptation: turning wellness into a moral identity, a lifetime of deferred living in the name of staying ready to live later. Sterne punctures that fantasy with one acidic comparison: the treasure isn't life; it's the fear of losing it.