Education Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne is smuggling a warning inside what looks like a compliment to curiosity. By pairing “knowledge” with “riches,” he refuses the comforting myth that learning is automatically ennobling. He frames it as appetite: a thirst that doesn’t resolve with satisfaction but sharpens with every sip. The line flatters the reader’s self-image as a seeker, then quietly suggests you may just be feeding another kind of greed.

The craft is in the simile’s sting. “Desire” and “thirst” are bodily words, not Enlightenment abstractions. Knowledge isn’t a serene ascent toward truth; it’s metabolism. Acquisition doesn’t calm you down, it recalibrates your baseline. Once you know a little, you can finally see how much you don’t know - and that newly visible horizon becomes its own provocation. Sterne’s syntax even enacts accumulation: the clause keeps extending, mimicking the way wanting tends to outrun having.

Context matters: Sterne wrote in the 18th century, when rational inquiry was becoming a fashionable virtue and collecting facts, objects, and experiences could pass for moral progress. As a novelist with a comic, skeptical edge, he’s suspicious of any posture that makes people look purified. The subtext is less “learn more” than “watch what learning turns you into.” If the desire for knowledge behaves like the desire for money, then intellect can be a status project, a hoard, a way to keep score. The quote lands because it treats curiosity not as a halo, but as a hunger - and hunger always has motives.