Life & Wisdom Quote by Sarah Fielding

Flattery, in Sarah Fielding's hands, is less a compliment than a pickpocket with good manners. The line turns courtship into a high-stakes social transaction: praise isn’t innocent currency, it’s leverage. Calling it "the highest insolence" flips the usual romantic script. Insolence isn’t merely rudeness here; it’s the audacity of assuming access to someone’s interior life while performing devotion. Fielding’s sting is that flattery inflates you just long enough to make you pliable.

The sentence works because it stages a bait-and-switch in real time. "Pretends to bestow on you more than you deserve" describes the sugar rush: a lover offers a version of you that feels better than the one you inhabit. That "more than you deserve" isn’t moralizing so much as diagnostic: flattery relies on a tiny private insecurity (what if I’m not enough?) and temporarily patches it with excess admiration. Then comes the trapdoor: it "is watching an opportunity". Courtship becomes surveillance, attentiveness weaponized. The goal isn’t to honor your worth; it’s to identify what can be extracted - consent, reputation, autonomy, money, time.

Context matters. As an 18th-century novelist writing in a culture where women’s social and economic futures could hinge on marriage, Fielding treats romantic rhetoric as a power technology. Her warning isn’t anti-love; it’s pro-literacy. Learn to hear the difference between genuine regard and praise that demands repayment, because the cost of believing the wrong language could be "what you really have."