Life & Wisdom Quote by Sarah Fielding

Fielding is diagnosing a kind of everyday tyranny: the impulse to treat the world as pliable material for our private script. The line’s old-fashioned cadence ("Tis", "bending") matters because it frames the problem as moral posture, not mere mistake. Error, for her, isn’t primarily a failure of intelligence; it’s a failure of orientation. When you approach people, events, even principles as things to be bent, you don’t just risk disappointment - you create "confusion", a word that suggests self-inflicted fog: mixed motives, misread signals, plans built on wishful thinking.

The subtext is quietly radical for an 18th-century woman writer. Fielding is pushing back against a culture of mastery - social, domestic, intellectual - where control is mistaken for competence. "Chief source of every error" is deliberate overreach: she’s not making an empirically cautious claim, she’s naming a root sin. By inflating the diagnosis, she forces a recognition that the urge to dominate doesn’t stay confined to grand ambitions. It infects small interactions: the need to win a conversation, to make a friend behave correctly, to demand that reality validate our self-image.

Contextually, this sits comfortably beside the period’s moral psychology and emerging novelistic interest in interior life. Fielding, writing in an era that prized reason, points to the sabotage that reason can’t fix: the willful, self-serving pressure we apply before facts even arrive. The sentence works because it turns "purpose" - usually praised as virtue - into the mechanism of distortion.