Henry Fielding Quotes

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.

People will tell you most of the story… and I’ve learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they’re afraid.

I knelt and opened up my lute case. Moving the lute aside, I pressed the lid of the secret compartment and twisted it open. I slid Threpe's sealed letter inside, where it joined the hollow horn with Nina's drawing and a small sack of dried apple I had stowed there. There was nothing special about the dried apple, but in my opinion if you have a secret compartment in your lute case and don't use it to hide things, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Men conceal the past scenes of their lives.

If we finished our work, the teacher would say, 'Now don't read ahead.' But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.

Make-up covers a multitude of sins.

To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of like to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts--this whispering "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.

One bush, they say, can never hide two thieves.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for us to build those emplacements under the guise of something totally different and they would have never been discovered. The amazing thing was that they weren't discovered earlier. It was a question of carelessness, lack of foresight.

Nobody knows I'm Elvis, nobody knows this is me. After all of my tries, I've got the perfect disguise.

Solemnity is the shield of idiots

The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church.

The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.

A traveling show visited a country town and one of the acts was advertised as a striptease. A small boy begged his mother for a quarter to buy a ticket, but the mother refused, telling her son that if he went to that show he would see something awful. Well, the boy sneaked in the show and the first thing he saw was something awful - his own dad sitting on the front row.

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

Don't lie, but don't tell the whole truth.

Everybody has something to conceal.

Not all of us know what we are. Some of us die without ever knowing. Some of us know, and never get caught. But we're out there. Trust me.

A man is hid under his tongue.

The eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not be found out" is despicable, but nevertheless, it is the one thing you can never get away from.

They are playing above the ground.

What ever you do-Don't get caught.