Wit & Attitude Quote by William Shenstone

Shenstone’s line is a neat little trapdoor: it looks like friendly, homespun wisdom, then drops you into a harsher view of human nature. “A fool and his words are soon parted” isn’t just a warning against babbling. It’s a claim that speech itself is a resource you can waste. The sensible person hoards language, spending it with care; the fool hemorrhages it, mistaking talk for thought and disclosure for connection.

The construction sharpens the insult. By pairing “fool” with “his words,” Shenstone gives language the status of property - something you can possess, lose, or mismanage. “Soon parted” carries the cool inevitability of a proverb, as if the separation is less a moral failure than a predictable physical law. That’s the subtext: stupidity is legible, and it reveals itself quickly. The fool doesn’t need to be unmasked; he volunteers the evidence.

Context matters here. Mid-18th-century English culture prized “polite” conversation, restraint, and social calibration. In that world, talking too much wasn’t merely annoying; it was socially expensive, a sign you hadn’t mastered the era’s codes of taste and self-control. Shenstone, a poet with a keen ear for how reputations are made in drawing rooms and letters, turns etiquette into epistemology: the way you speak becomes a proxy for what you are.

The sting of the line is its cynicism about persuasion. Words won’t save you if you can’t govern them; they’ll betray you faster than your enemies can.