Life & Wisdom Quote by Frances Burney

Burney’s sentence catches us mid-performance: the little speech we deliver after we’ve already taken a position, scrambling to make our stance look inevitable. The sting is in “continually” and “support” - she’s not diagnosing an occasional lapse but a steady habit of self-justification. Once an opinion is “given,” it acquires social weight. To retract it is to risk looking fickle, rude, or (worse, in Burney’s world) improperly governed. So we keep talking, piling up reasons like props, even when we “don’t above half mean” them.

That last phrase is Burney’s quiet scalpel. She isn’t accusing people of outright lying; she’s pointing to the half-belief, the convenient belief, the belief that’s real only as long as it’s useful. It’s an early, elegant sketch of motivated reasoning: we don’t argue to find what’s true, we argue to keep our footing in the room. The line also has the rhythm of conversation overheard in a drawing room, where politeness can force conviction into existence. You commit, then you retrofit.

Context matters: Burney navigated court life and the intense social theater of late-18th-century Britain, where reputation was currency and conversation was a battleground conducted in gloves. Her novels obsess over how speech traps people - how a small remark becomes a moral ledger. The quote works because it doesn’t moralize; it exposes a mechanism. Burney’s real target is vanity’s aftershock: the moment your mouth keeps going because your pride already spoke.