Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Fielding

Fielding’s line doesn’t flatter the reader with a tidy moral about money. It does something sharper: it treats wealth and want as parallel forms of deafness. “Hear reason” is the key phrase - not “do the right thing,” not “be kind,” but the Enlightenment ideal that humans can be talked into sense. Fielding’s cynicism is that extreme conditions don’t merely tempt people; they reorganize what counts as persuasive.

The symmetry is the trick. “Great poverty” is obvious: when survival is on the line, lectures about prudence or virtue can sound like a foreign language. But Fielding doesn’t stop there. “Great riches” get the same diagnosis, and that’s the barb aimed at genteel England: plenty can be as reality-warping as hunger. The very rich aren’t irrational because they’re stupid; they’re irrational because the world keeps agreeing with them. Consequences soften, contradictions get bought off, and “reason” becomes just another opinion.

As a novelist and magistrate, Fielding wrote in a culture obsessed with improvement, manners, and moral instruction, even as London’s inequality and corruption made those sermons feel theatrical. The sentence reads like a miniature social theory smuggled into a proverb: moderation is not just a virtue but a cognitive advantage. You can negotiate with someone who has room to choose. At the extremes, choice collapses into need on one end and entitlement on the other, and argument loses its leverage.