Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s jab lands because it treats “health” not as a virtue but as a currency, and then asks the most embarrassing question a culture of self-optimization hates: what’s the point of saving if you never spend? By likening the health-obsessed to misers, he flips the usual moral hierarchy. Prudence, discipline, restraint - these are supposed to read as enlightened. Sterne makes them look petty, joyless, even faintly comic: a person guarding a locked chest of well-being while life happens elsewhere.

The intent isn’t anti-health so much as anti-fixation. The phrase “overly take care” is doing the real work, implying a threshold where care curdles into compulsion. That subtext feels modern: when the maintenance routine becomes the main event, wellness turns into a kind of anxious bookkeeping. The “treasure” metaphor is cruelly accurate because it captures how preventive behavior can become speculative, always oriented toward a future payoff that may never arrive. You can’t “enjoy” a stockpile of unused vitality any more than you can eat a saved-up feast.

Context matters: Sterne, an 18th-century novelist and satirist (and a man intimately acquainted with illness), is writing in a period fascinated by manners, moderation, and the performance of virtue. He needles the emerging idea that moral worth is measurable in habits. The line isn’t a license for recklessness; it’s a reminder that a life reduced to risk management is still a life reduced. Health, in Sterne’s frame, is only meaningful as a means - not a shrine.