Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

A wicked little jab, delivered with the calm voice of someone who’s watched too many earnest people turn a holy book into a legal brief. Sterne’s line isn’t just anti-sect; it’s anti-credulity, aimed at the Christian habit of treating Scripture as an infinitely flexible resource for winning arguments. The sting lands in the phrase “however absurd”: he’s not claiming all sects are absurd, he’s noting that even the most outlandish ones can find a verse, a parable, a stray metaphor to dress themselves in authority.

The intent is less to attack Christianity than to puncture the mechanics of religious certainty. Sterne is pointing at a rhetorical loophole: if Scripture is regarded as the final court of appeal, then the cleverest or most desperate interpreter can always cherry-pick a precedent. That’s the subtext: the problem isn’t merely bad doctrine, it’s a system that rewards proof-texting, where persuasion becomes an exercise in selective quotation rather than moral reasoning.

Context matters. Sterne writes in an England still living with the aftershocks of Reformation fragmentation and sectarian conflict, where doctrinal skirmishes weren’t abstract but social and political. As a novelist and a cleric, he’s also attuned to how language performs. His irony is a warning about texts that are revered beyond dispute: the more sacred the source, the more tempting it becomes to use it as a ventriloquist’s dummy for human ambition, anxiety, or vanity.