Top 100 Quotes About Henry Fielding
#1. The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.
Jonathan Coe
#2. The hounds all join in glorious cry, / The huntsman winds his horn: / And a-hunting we will go.
Henry Fielding
#3. What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.
Henry Fielding
#4. A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.
Henry Fielding
#6. When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good. Oh! the roast beef of England. And Old England's roast beef.
Henry Fielding
#7. The elegant Lord Shaftesbury somewhere objects to telling too much truth: by which it may be fairly inferred, that, in some cases, to lie is not only excusable but commendable. And
Henry Fielding
#8. How often, when I have told you that all men are false and perjury alike, and grow tired of us as soon as ever they have had their wicked wills of us, how often have you sworn you would never forsake me?
Henry Fielding
#9. A good man therefore is a standing lesson to us all.
Henry Fielding
#10. It is well known to all great men, that by conferring an obligation they do not always procure a friend, but are certain of creating many enemies.
Henry Fielding
#12. Petition me no petitions, sir, to-day; Let other hours be set apart for business. To-day it is our pleasure to be drunk; And this our queen shall be as drunk as we.
Henry Fielding
#13. A broken heart is a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bills of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases, namely, that no physicians can cure it.
Henry Fielding
#14. Prudence is a duty which we owe ourselves, and if we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others too often are apt to build upon it.
Henry Fielding
#15. Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.
Henry Fielding
#16. For I hope my Friends will pardon me, when I declare, I know none of them without a Fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine, I had any Friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness, of this Kind, we give and demand in Turn.
Henry Fielding
#17. I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.
Henry Fielding
#18. When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.
Henry Fielding
#19. He that dies before sixty, of a cold or consumption, dies, in reality, by a violent death.
Henry Fielding
#20. A good heart will, at all times, betray the best head in the world.
Henry Fielding
#21. Without adversity a person hardly knows whether they are honest or not.
Henry Fielding
#22. Never trust the man who has reason to suspect that you know he has injured you
Henry Fielding
#23. Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.
Henry Fielding
#24. A French lieutenant, who had been long enough out of France to forget his own language, but not long enough in England to learn ours, so that he really spoke no language at all.
Henry Fielding
#25. Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.
Henry Fielding
#26. Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.
Henry Fielding
#27. When the effects of female jealousy do not appear openly in their proper colours of rage and fury, we may suspect that mischievous passion to be at work privately, and attempting to undermine, what it doth not attack above-ground.
Henry Fielding
#28. Life may as properly be called an art as any other.
Henry Fielding
#29. A man may go to heaven with half the pains it cost him to purchase hell.
Henry Fielding
#30. Thirst teaches all animals to drink, but drunkenness belongs only to man.
Henry Fielding
#31. Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.
Henry Fielding
#32. Nothing can be so quick and sudden as the operations of the mind, especially when hope, or fear, or jealousy, to which the other two are but journeymen, set it to work.
Henry Fielding
#33. It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.
Henry Fielding
#34. In the forming of female friendships beauty seldom recommends one woman to another.
Henry Fielding
#35. Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil.
Henry Fielding
#36. The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.
Henry Fielding
#37. Money is the fruit of evil, as often as the root of it.
Henry Fielding
#38. Worth begets in base minds, envy; in great souls, emulation.
Henry Fielding
#39. There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
Henry Fielding
#40. Perhaps the summary of good-breeding may be reduced to this rule. "Behave unto all men as you would they should behave unto you." This will most certainly oblige us to treat all mankind with the utmost civility and respect, there being nothing that we desire more than to be treated so by them.
Henry Fielding
#41. A truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with excellency of heart.
Henry Fielding
#42. Lo, when two dogs are fighting in the streets, With a third dog one of the two dogs meets; With angry teeth he bites him to the bone, And this dog smarts for what that dog has done.
Henry Fielding
#44. The slander of some people is as great a recommendation as the praise of others.
Henry Fielding
#45. To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.
Henry Fielding
#46. Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?
Henry Fielding
#47. There are two considerations which always imbitter the heart of an avaricious man
the one is a perpetual thirst after more riches, the other the prospect of leaving what he has already acquired.
Henry Fielding
#48. When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.
Henry Fielding
#49. Love may be likened to a disease in this respect, that when it is denied a vent in one part, it will certainly break out in another; hence what a woman's lips often conceal, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions betray.
Henry Fielding
#50. Nothing more aggravates ill success than the near approach of good.
Henry Fielding
#51. One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can.
Henry Fielding
#52. His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.
Henry Fielding
#53. If thou hast seen all these without knowing what beauty is, thou hast no eyes; if without feeling its power, thou hast no heart.
Henry Fielding
#54. What was said by the Latin poet of labor
that it conquers all things
is much more true when applied to impudence.
Henry Fielding
#55. Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness.
Henry Fielding
#58. Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller ... who always proportions his stay in any place.
Henry Fielding
#59. The prudence of the best heads is often defeated by the tenderness of the best hearts.
Henry Fielding
#60. We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.
Henry Fielding
#61. It is a good maxim to trust a person entirely or not at all.
Henry Fielding
#62. [ ... ] for the philosophy of Square rendered him superior to all emotions, and he very calmly smoaked his pipe, as was his custom in all broils, unless when he apprehended some danger of having it broke in his mouth.
Henry Fielding
#63. No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.
Henry Fielding
#64. a proof that good books, no more than good men, do always survive the bad.
Henry Fielding
#65. Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
Henry Fielding
#66. To the generality of men you cannot give a stronger hint for them to impose upon you than by imposing upon yourself.
Henry Fielding
#67. It is with jealousy as with the gout. When such distempers are in the blood, there is never any security against their breaking out, and that often on the slightest occasions, and when least suspected.
Henry Fielding
#68. Some virtuous women are too liberal in their insults to a frail sister; but virtue can support itself without borrowing any assistance from the vices of other women.
Henry Fielding
#69. The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.
Henry Fielding
#70. He in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.
Henry Fielding
#71. but her patience was perhaps tired out, for this is a virtue which is very apt to be fatigued by exercise. Mrs
Henry Fielding
#72. The arrows of fortune ... .. derive their force from the velocity with which they are discharged; for, when they approach you by slow and perceptible degrees, they have but very little power to do you mischief.
Henry Fielding
#73. Every physician almost hath his favourite disease.
Henry Fielding
#74. The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation
Henry Fielding
#75. Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.
Henry Fielding
#77. Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.
Henry Fielding
#78. It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.
Henry Fielding
#79. As for my landlord, drinking was his trade; and the liquor had no more effect on him than it had on any other vessel in his house. The
Henry Fielding
#80. Genius,thou gift of heaven; without whose aid in vain we struggle against the stream of nature.
Henry Fielding
#82. Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.
Henry Fielding
#83. We endeavor to conceal our vices under the disguise of the opposite virtues.
Henry Fielding
#84. If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.
Henry Fielding
#85. No acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.
Henry Fielding
#86. Though we may sometimes unintentionally bestow our beneficence on the unworthy, it does not take from the merit of the act. For charity doth not adopt the vices of its objects.
Henry Fielding
#87. Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.
Henry Fielding
#88. To see a Woman you love in Distress; to be unable to relieve her, and at the same Time to reflect that you have brought her into this Situation, is, perhaps, a Curse of which no Imagination can represent the Horrors to those who have not felt it.
Henry Fielding
#89. LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.
Henry Fielding
#91. There is scarce any man, how much soever he may despise the character of a flatterer, but will condescend in the meanest manner to flatter himself
Henry Fielding
#92. There is nothing a man of good sense dreads in a wife so much as her having more sense than himself.
Henry Fielding
#93. Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.
Henry Fielding
#94. Beauty may be the object of liking
great qualities of admiration
good ones of esteem
but love only is the object of love.
Henry Fielding
#96. Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#97. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates
Henry Fielding
#98. It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species.
Henry Fielding
#99. There is an insolence which none but those who themselves deserve contempt can bestow, and those only who deserve no contempt can bear.
Henry Fielding
#100. A good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself, which the neglect of legislators hath forgotten to supply.
Henry Fielding
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top