Wit & Attitude Quote by Henry Fielding

Flattery, Fielding suggests, is less a compliment than a key: pick the lock that matches the person’s vice, and the door swings open. The line plays like a social experiment conducted with a novelist’s smirk. Praise a fool for “wit” or a rogue for “honesty” and you’re not merely being polite; you’re laundering their self-image, giving them permission to believe the best lie about themselves. In return, they “receive you into his favor” - not because you’ve revealed truth, but because you’ve confirmed the story they prefer.

Fielding’s specific intent is surgical: expose how quickly moral judgment collapses into strategy. The pairings are deliberately perverse. A fool’s wit and a rogue’s honesty are contradictions, and that’s the point: the compliment works precisely because it is undeserved. It signals complicity. You are willing to suspend discernment in exchange for access.

The subtext cuts both ways. It mocks the vain and the crooked, yes, but it also implicates the speaker - and the reader - as someone who understands the transaction. “Commend” isn’t “admire”; it’s performative, a choice. Fielding is writing in an 18th-century world of patronage, salons, and reputations where advancement often depended less on merit than on managing egos. The sentence is a compact manual for social climbing, disguised as moral observation.

It still lands because it names an uncomfortable modern truth: power rarely demands your sincerity. It asks for your endorsement.