–Not that the phrase is at all to my liking: for to say a man is fallen in love,––or that he is deeply in love,––or up to the ears in love,––and sometimes even over head and ears in it,––carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:––this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,––I hold to be damnable and heretical:––and so much for that.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 450

Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 369

Inconsistent soul that man is!––languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal!––his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!––his reason, that precious gift of God to him––(instead of pouring in oil) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities,––to multiply his pains, and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them!

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) pp. 211-212

To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuch as one is a portion of the other,––we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is, we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account, how we came by it.––What is that to any body? quoth my uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking and smoaking our pipes: or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking,––and so according to that preconceived––You puzzle me to death, cried my uncle Toby.
––'Tis owing to this, replied my father, that in our computations of time, we are so used to minutes, hours, weeks, and months,–and of clocks (I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom) to measure out their several portions to us, and to those who belong to us,–that 'twill be well, if in time to come, the succession of our ideas be of any use or service to us at all.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Penguin Books, 1988) p. 200