Top 90 Horace Walpole Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.”

— Horace Walpole

52. “It is charming to totter into vogue.”

— Horace Walpole

53. “Lawyers and rogues are vermin not easily rooted out of a rich soil.”

— Horace Walpole

54. “Oh, we are ridiculous animals; and if the angels have any fun in them, how we must divert them!”

— Horace Walpole

55. “I have known men of valor cowards to their wives.”

— Horace Walpole

56. “To act with common sense according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know.”

— Horace Walpole

57. “I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company.”

— Horace Walpole

58. “It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink.”

— Horace Walpole

59. “The passions seldom give good advice but to the interested and mercenary. Resentment generally suggests bad measures. Second thoughts and good nature will rarely, very rarely, approve the first hints of anger.”

— Horace Walpole

60. “One’s mind suffers only when one is young and while one is ignorant of the world. When one has lived for some time, one learns that the young think too little and the old too much, and one grows careless about both.”

— Horace Walpole

61. “I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted.”

— Horace Walpole

62. “How posterity will laugh at us, one way or other! If half a dozen break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.”

— Horace Walpole

63. “The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon.”

— Horace Walpole

64. “We often repent of our first thoughts, and scarce ever of our second.”

— Horace Walpole

65. “Foolish writers and readers are created for each other.”

— Horace Walpole

66. “Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.”

— Horace Walpole

67. “The sure way of judging whether our first thoughts are judicious, is to sleep on them. If they appear of the same force the next morning as they did over night, and if good nature ratifies what good sense approves, we may be pretty sure we are in the right.”

— Horace Walpole

68. “A man of sense, though born without wit, often lives to have wit. His memory treasures up ideas and reflections; he compares themwith new occurrences, and strikes out new lights from the collision. The consequence is sometimes bons mots, and sometimes apothegms.”

— Horace Walpole

69. “I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.”

— Horace Walpole

70. “A careless song, with a little nonsense in it now and then, does not mis-become a monarch.”

— Horace Walpole

71. “Had I children, my utmost endeavors would be to make them musicians.”

— Horace Walpole

72. “Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.”

— Horace Walpole

73. “How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.”

— Horace Walpole

74. “Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”

— Horace Walpole

75. “Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.”

— Horace Walpole

76. “It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.”

— Horace Walpole

77. “I do not admire politicians; but when they are excellent in their way, one cannot help allowing them their due.”

— Horace Walpole

78. “The farther I travel, the less I wonder at anything: a few days reconcile one to a new spot, or an unseen custom; and men are so much the same everywhere, that one scare perceives a change in situation.”

— Horace Walpole

79. “Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line.”

— Horace Walpole

80. “I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery.”

— Horace Walpole

81. “A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.”

— Horace Walpole

82. “I know that I have had friends who would never have vexed or betrayed me, if they had walked on all fours.”

— Horace Walpole

83. “Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.”

— Horace Walpole

84. “Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.”

— Horace Walpole

85. “It is difficult to divest one’s self of vanity; because impossible to divest one’s self of self-love.”

— Horace Walpole

86. “I hold visions to be wisdom, and would deny them only to ambition, which exists only by the destruction of visions of everybody else.”

— Horace Walpole

87. “Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”

— Horace Walpole

88. “It was easier to conquer it than to know what to do with it.”

— Horace Walpole

89. “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”

— Horace Walpole

90. “The most remarkable thing I have observed since I came abroad, is, that there are no people so obviously mad as the English.”

— Horace Walpole

91. “It is sinful to cherish those whom heaven has doomed to destruction.”

— Horace Walpole

92. “My veracity is dearer to me than my life,” said the peasant; “nor would I purchase the one by forfeiting the other.”

— Horace Walpole

93. “There is nothing I hold so cheap as a learned man, except an unlearned one .”

— Horace Walpole

94. “Nor have I forgotten sir. that the charity of his daughter delivered me from his power. I can forget injuries but never benefits.”

— Horace Walpole

95. “He sighed, and retired, but with eyes fixed on the gate, until Matilda, closing it, put an end to an interview, in which the hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion, which both now tasted for the first time.”

— Horace Walpole

96. “The hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion which both now tasted for the first time.”

— Horace Walpole

97. “My soul abhors a falsehood.”

— Horace Walpole