Henry Fielding Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Henry Fielding with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“those know little of real love or grief who do not know how much we deceive ourselves when we pretend to aim at the cure of either.”
Meaning & context
Booth recognizes that people may claim to be curing love or grief while unconsciously choosing actions that keep those feelings alive.
Source details
Amelia, Book II, Chapter III, “The narrative continued. More of the touchstone,” Project Gutenberg #6098, George Saintsbury edited witness. Captain Booth says the love / grief sentence while recounting his failed attempts to cure himself of attachment to Amelia. It is fictional retrospective speech, not clinical guidance about grief or relationships.
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“It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.”
Meaning & context
Fielding’s narrator argues that visible examples of conduct can shape imitation more powerfully than abstract instruction alone.
Source details
Joseph Andrews, Book I, Chapter I, Project Gutenberg #9611. Fielding opens his narrator’s discussion of exemplary lives by observing that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts, then develops the claim through imitation and the moral purpose he assigns to writing. It is eighteenth-century literary argument, not a modern experimental finding about learning.
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“It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.”
Meaning & context
Fielding distinguishes correcting the judgment of basically well-intentioned people from trying to reform people whose conduct is fundamentally committed to wrongdoing.
Source details
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, concluding authorial reflection, Project Gutenberg #6593. Fielding explains one of the novel’s stated moral aims: prudence can protect virtue from traps that deceit and indiscretion create.