Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne aims his blade at the kind of “religion” that functions less as faith than as a nagging chaperone: always present, always correcting, and therefore uniquely irritating to people who refuse to self-correct. The line turns on a neat inversion. Religion is framed as “troublesome” not because restraint is inherently bad, but because restraint becomes intolerable when it’s experienced as external policing rather than internal discipline. Sterne’s real target is the hypocrisy industry: the person who wants appetite without consequence, then resents the moral vocabulary that names what they’re doing.

The subtext is psychological and social. If you “lay no restraints upon” yourself, any system that asks you to pause, deny, confess, or consider others will feel like an unwanted roommate. Sterne implies that the problem isn’t religion’s strictness so much as the individual’s refusal to develop an inner brake. In that sense, the quote reads like an early diagnosis of what we now call moral licensing: people who want the cultural benefits of virtue-signaling without the personal costs of virtuous behavior.

Context matters. Sterne is a clergyman’s son writing in an 18th-century Britain where Anglican respectability carried real social weight, and where the novel was becoming a laboratory for private motives. His fiction thrives on comic exposure of self-deception; this sentence does the same work in miniature. It’s a sly defense of restraint that never sounds pious, and a critique of piety that never lets the libertine off the hook.