Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller’s line lands like a small moral trap: it flatters you with its plainness, then reveals the price tag hiding underneath. “Compliments cost nothing” frames praise as a free social lubricant, a bit of verbal pocket change. But the twist - “many pay dear for them” - exposes how that “free” economy quietly runs on vanity, dependence, and manipulation. The wit is clerical, not cynical for sport: it’s a warning delivered in the compact, proverb-shaped style that let seventeenth-century moralists smuggle social critique into everyday speech.

The subtext is about power. If compliments are free to give, why do people spend so much trying to obtain them? Because praise can function like credit: it props up status, soothes insecurity, and signals belonging. People “pay dear” not only with money (patronage, gifts, bribes, conspicuous generosity) but with something more costly: integrity. They trade honest judgment for approval, shrink their opinions to fit a room, or adopt performative virtue to secure admiration. Fuller, a clergyman writing in an England roiled by civil war, sectarian conflict, and shifting allegiances, would have seen how quickly public piety and loyalty could become currencies in a high-stakes reputation market.

What makes the sentence work is its asymmetry. The first clause invites trust; the second clause indicts human behavior without naming a culprit. It doesn’t scold “flatterers” so much as the flattered. The real target is the hunger to be praised - the weakness that makes a free compliment outrageously expensive.