"Shandy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more than once received from his lips curses as sententious and as complicated as that celebrated anathema of the church, for a knowledge of which most unlettered Protestants are indebted to the pious researches of the worthy Tristram Shandy. But as Middleton recovered from his exhaustion he was fain to appease the boisterous temper of his associate, by admonishing him of the uselessness of such denunciations, and of the possibility of their hastening the very evil he deprecated, by irritating the resentments ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... says Leigh Hunt in his "Essay on Wit and Humor," "to name the book of all others which combines wit and humor under their highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be 'Tristram Shandy,'" the chief work of Laurence Sterne, who was born in 1713, and died in 1768. The following story of LeFevre, drawn from that unique book, full of simple pathos and gentle kindness, presents, perhaps, the best picture of the character ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... perhaps be better for her that she should marry Mr Whittlestaff. All her friends would think it to be infinitely better. Could there be anything more moonstruck, more shandy, more wretchedly listless, than for a girl, a penniless girl, to indulge in dreams of an impossible lover, when such a tower of strength presented itself to her as was Mr Whittlestaff? She had consented ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... a name as injurious to the logographic newspaper as Tristram was to Mr. Shandy's son; but old Shandy forgot he might have rectified by confirmation the mistake of the parson at baptism, and with the touch of a bishop changed Tristram into Trismegistus. The Universal Register, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... article in the 'Dictionary of National Biography' on Sterne, that author is to be regarded as the 'only begetter' of the epithet. Mr. Lee says that it first occurs in a letter of 1740 written by the future author of 'Tristram Shandy' to the Miss Lumley he afterwards married. Here is the precise and characteristic passage:— 'I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often graced, in those quiet and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places, but in others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less harmonious for being somewhat faded. The corner cupboard was agreeable in design; and there ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fellow wrote the book. You can't deny that, though Thackeray may tempt you to forget it. (What proportion does my Uncle Toby hold in that amiable Lecture?) The truth is that the elemental simplicity of Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim did not appeal to the author of The Book of Snobs in the same degree as the pettiness of the man Sterne appealed to him: and his business in Willis's Rooms was to talk, not of Captain Shandy, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and "Tristram Shandy" are books a man is the better for reading, if he read them wisely. They teach him that literature, to be a living force, must deal with all sides of life, and that little help comes to us from that silly pretence of ours that we are perfect in all things, leading perfect lives, that only ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... he inaugurated the out-and-out sea story, that is the story which takes place not, like 'Robinson Crusoe,' in small part, but mainly, on board ship. Prominent, on the other hand, among the sentimentalists is Laurence Sterne, who, inappropriately enough, was a clergyman, the author of 'Tristram Shandy.' This book is quite unlike anything else ever written. Sterne published it in nine successive volumes during almost as many years, and he made a point of almost complete formlessness and every sort of whimsicality. The hero is not born until the third volume, the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Pucelle by Voltaire, Inferno (that's Dante's), And Vanity Fair, Conybeare-Howson, Brillat-Savarin, And Baron Munchausen, Mademoiselle De Maupin, The Dramas of Marlowe, The Three Musketeers, Clarissa Harlowe, And the Pioneers, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, The Ring and the Book, And Handy Andy, And Captain Cook, The Plato of Jowett, And Mill's Pol. Econ., The Haunts of Howitt, The Encheiridion, Lothair by Disraeli, And Boccaccio, The Student's Paley, And Westward Ho! The Pharmacop[oe]ia, Macaulay's ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and had recently been appointed lecturer of St. Mathews, Friday Street. Whether the worthy cleric resided altogether in London and discharged his duties in the country by proxy, or whether Mrs. Haywood, like Tristram Shandy's mother, enjoyed the privilege of coming to town only on certain interesting occasions, are questions which curious research fails to satisfy. At any rate, one of the two children assigned to her by tradition was born, as we have ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... now curious to see whether the following will find a palliator. It is from "Tristram Shandy," book V. chapter 3. There are two curious idioms, "for for" and "half in half"; but these have nothing to do with ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... none of this in Congreve. I only know, that my recollection of his plays is like that of a vile nightmare, which I would not for anything have return to me. I have read, since, books as bad, perhaps worse in some respects, but I have found the redemption here and there. I would no more place Shandy in any boy's hands than Congreve and Farquhar; and yet I can read Tristram again and again with delight; for amid all that is bad there stand out Trim and Toby, pure specimens of the best side of human nature, coming home to us and telling ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... unhappy unless by his own fault." And the author of Telemachus begins his work by saying, that Calypso could not console herself for the loss of Ulysses, and found herself unhappy in being immortal. In the first hours of grief the methods of consolation used by uncle Toby, in Tristram Shandy, is probably the best; "he sat down in an arm chair by the bed of his distressed ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... abjuration of constitutional monarchy. It was impossible, therefore, for Eustace to obtain the permission for which his soul panted; and academic repose ill suited the self-devoted soldier. His retirement was spent in a somewhat similar way to that of Toby Shandy. He read descriptions of battles and sieges; he planned ravelins and counterscarps; and he braced his frame, and exercised his muscles, by every athletic exertion which could inure him to toil, or facilitate his success ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... library of not more than twenty-five books, but they were ones that only a lover of good reading would have chosen. Shakespeare and Burns held honored places there. Scott's poems and three or four of his novels were in the collection. In worn leather bindings were "Tristram Shandy," and Smollett's "Complete History of England." Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" shouldered Butler's "Hudibras" and Baxter's "The Saint's Everlasting Rest." Into this choice company one frivolous modern novel had stolen its way. "Nicholas Nickleby" had been brought ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... had been successively Prior of Canterbury and Abbot of Peterborough; built at both those places as well as at Rochester; famous for saintliness, and a great authority on canon law; perhaps best known generally by Sterne's comments in "Tristram Shandy" on the terrible excommunication curse contained in his "Textus Roffensis"; died ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... from her (my aunt was to accompany me to America, and it was uncertain whether we should see Miss S—— again before we sailed).... When I returned, after seeing her off, I went disconsolately to my own room. As I could not sleep, I took up the first book at hand, but it was "Tristram Shandy," and too horribly discordant with my frame of mind; besides, I don't like it at any time; it seems to me much more coarse even ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for "Tristram Shandy" I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the whole ignorant troop of our predestined, of our legions of snivelers, of smokers, of snuff-takers, of old and captious men that Sterne addressed, in Tristram Shandy, the letter written by Walter Shandy to his brother Toby, when this last proposed to marry the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... le Fataliste none of that gift of true creation which produced such figures as Trim, and my Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy. Jacques's master is a mere lay figure, and Jacques himself, with his monotonous catchword, "Il etait ecrit la-haut," has no real personality; he has none of the naturalness that wins us to Corporal Trim, still less has he any touch of the profound humour of the immortal ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... characteristics of police magistrate, surgeon, confessor, and moralist—enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in its day. Fielding's Journal had perhaps the least immediate success of the four. Sterne's Journey unquestionably had the most. The tenant of "Shandy Hall," as was customary in the first heyday of "Anglomania," went to Paris to ratify his successes, and the resounding triumph of his naughtiness there, by a reflex action, secured the vote of London. Posterity ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Shandy, and this is the record of my Sentimental Journey. Mr. Ames Jordan Gannett, proprietor's son of the "York——," with which paper I am connected by marriage, sent me a post-card in a sealed envelope, asking me to call at a well-known restaurant in Regent Street. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Shandy," said Sir Peter, resuming his stand on the hearthstone, "that among the responsibilities of a parent the choice of the name which his child is to bear for life is one of the gravest. And this is especially so with those who ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the great trunk and its contents. "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and 'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... humor, is not to be named with his master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What are Siebenkaes, Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes,) compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own? Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... horror of being lengthy, and seems to have been really much annoyed and distressed when he found how the 'Variations of Animals and Plants' was growing under his hands. I remember his cordially agreeing with 'Tristram Shandy's' words, "Let no man say, 'Come, I'll ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in "Tristram Shandy" or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... reading, for we are not in condition of eager curiosity. This is all still more true of Dante, whose work is not, in the proper sense of the word, an epic, but a descriptive poem. The same thing may be said of the four immortal romances: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Wilhelm Meister. To arouse our interest is by no means the chief aim of these works; in Tristram Shandy the hero, even at the end of the book, is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... do not know if it has already been called to your attention or not, but my grandfather, Shandy Jones, was at that time a member of the Alabama Legislature. I do not know the year, but think I can get the dates for you if it is ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... influences of the scene, but evidently devised and wrought up into point and apparent application by a subsequent process. We have dreams which were never dreamt, and reveries which are any thing but involuntary. There are too many Tristram Shandy transitions, sundry cockneyisms in expression, (we use the word in a wide sense,) and one or two jokes which make the blood run cold. Lastly, we are compelled to say that we repose much more confidence in the writer's taste ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... impression on the army that cannot be well imagined by those who saw it not. The whole army, and at last all people both in city and country were singing it perpetually, and perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect.' Bumet's Own Time, ed. 1818, ii. 430. In Tristram Shandy, vol. i. chap. 21, when Mr. Shandy advanced one of his hypotheses:—'My uncle Toby,' we read, 'would never offer to answer this by any other kind of argument than that of whistling half-a-dozen ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... itself constitute humour, unless some peculiarity of individual temperament and character be indicated thereby, as the cause of the same. Compare the comedies of Congreve with the Falstaff in Henry IV. or with Sterne's Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy, or with some of Steele's charming papers in the Tatler, and you will feel the difference better than I can express it. Thus again, (to take an instance from the different works of the same writer), in Smollett's Strap, his Lieutenant Bowling, his Morgan the honest ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... and tatters, these takers of heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of the occupation of angels, are making,—what unkindly impression is left behind, or what more of harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of a Raphael or Correggio, (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into has something of the Correggiesque ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb |
