Henry Fielding: Trending quotes

Don Quixote in England (1731), Act I, scene vi http://books.google.com/books?id=8_VbAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Money+is+the+fruit+of+evil+as+often+as+the+root+of+it%22&pg=PA13#v=onepage

Money , Evil

“I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.”

Henry Fielding book Joseph Andrews

Book III, Ch. 1
Joseph Andrews (1742)

Men

“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”

Henry Fielding book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Source: Tom Jones

Beauty

“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 book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Source: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Hope , Imagination , Forgiveness

“We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.”

Henry Fielding

Books

“A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.”

Henry Fielding book Joseph Andrews

Author's Preface
Joseph Andrews (1742)

Life , Nature

“A crime, which, though perhaps not considered by law as the highest, is in truth and in fact, the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man.”

Henry Fielding

Fielding, Henry; ed. by William Ernest Henley. 1903. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq: Miscellaneous writings. W. Heinemann. p. 162

Truth , Law , Soul

“A good face, they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World?”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book IX, ch. 5
Amelia (1751)

Men , World , Art , Nature

“Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book III, ch. 11
Amelia (1751)

“We must eat to live and live to eat.”

Henry Fielding

Act III, sc. iii
The Miser (1733)

“I have found it; I have discovered the cause of all the misfortunes which befell him. A public school, Joseph, was the cause of all the calamaties which he afterwards suffered. Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.”

Henry Fielding book Joseph Andrews

Abraham Adams, speaking of his host, Wilson.
Book III, Ch. 5
Joseph Andrews (1742)

School , Suffering

“To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.”

Henry Fielding book Joseph Andrews

Book II, Ch. 8
Joseph Andrews (1742)

“He was, indeed, in a condition, in which, if reason had interposed, though only to advise, she might have received the answer which one Cleostratus gave many years ago to a silly fellow, who asked him, if he was not ashamed to be drunk? "Are not you," said Cleostratus, "ashamed to admonish a drunken man?" — To say the truth, in a court of justice drunkenness must not be an excuse, yet in a court of conscience it is greatly so.”

Henry Fielding

Book V, Ch. 10
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

Truth , Justice

“Oh, the roast beef of England,
And old England's roast beef!”

Henry Fielding

The Grub Street Opera (1731), Act iii, scene 2; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)