Walpole Quotes

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.

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

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humour was provided to console him for what he is.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. HORACE WALPOLE

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?” She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

But alas! my Lord, what is blood! what is nobility! We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures. It is piety alone that can distinguish us from the dust whence we sprung, and whither we must return.

I can forget injuries, but never benefits.

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

In science, mistakes always precede the truth.

Did Bach ever eat pancakes at midnight?

A bystander often sees more of the game than those that play

Foolish writers and readers are created for each other.

The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, "In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.

History doesn’t start with a tall building and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking us for suckers and is playing a mean game.

I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one.

I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

She leaves my side and heads deeper into the apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

Heaven mocks the short-sighted views of man.

This is a bad world; nor have I had cause to leave it with regret.

But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

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.

LADY CROOM: You have been reading too many novels by Mrs Radcliffe, that is my opinion. This is a garden for The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho -- CHATER: The Castle of Otranto, my lady, is by Horace Walpole. NOAKES: (Thrilled) Mr Walpole the gardener?! LADY CROOM: Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?

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

The archival document is a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event.

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.

The gentle maid, whose hapless tale, these melancholy pages speak; say, gracious lady, shall she fail To draw the tear a down from thy cheek?

This life is but a pilgrimage.

Don’t play for safety. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.

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

No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary. —HORACE WALPOLE,

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? . . . . Manual labour.

Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’. People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what you should name it.

....the Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In and then get sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and put together a little sober time and have things start to get better, head-wise and life-quality-wise, and after a while the new guys get cocky, they decide they've gotten `Well,' and they get really busy at the new job sobriety's allowed them to get, or maybe they buy season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover pussy and start chasing pussy (these withered gnarled toothless totally post-sexual old fuckers actually say pussy), but one way or another these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting away from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their Group itself, and then little by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then, without the protection of meetings or a Group, in time--oh there's always plenty of time, the Disease is fiendishly patient--how in time they forget what it was like, the ones that've cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day they're at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate Center's hot, and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they've gotten `Well.' Just one cold one. What could it hurt. And after that one it's like they'd never stopped, if they've got the Disease. And how in a month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In, back to the Boston AA halls and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their knees all over again, or maybe it's five or ten years before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn't ready for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There--the Crocodiles are always talking in hushed, 'Nam-like tones about Out There--or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there, Out There; or else, worst of all, these cocky new guys drift back Out There and have nothing sufficiently horrible to Finish them happen at all, just go back to drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars, undead, back in the Disease's cage all over again. The Crocodiles talk about how they can't count the number of guys that've Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die.

It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects.

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

The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children.

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

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

My soul abhors a falsehood

هذا العالم كوميديا للذين يفكرون ... و مأساة للذين يشعرون.

Code breaker Mabel Elliott's favorite quote was: It isn't life that matters! It's the courage we bring to it.

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

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

But whither should he run? He could not run so far away that his father could not find him—his father's arm stretched to everywhere in the world.

La vida es una comedia para quienes piensan y una tragedia para quienes sienten. Horace Walpole

Misfortune, the teacher of superstition. - Attributed by Walpole to his friend, Richard Bentley.

Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.

If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole

for “the world,” as Horace Walpole said, “is a comedy for those who think, but a tragedy for those who feel.

When working in the archive you will often find yourself thinking of this exploration as a dive, a submersion, perhaps even a drowning … you feel immersed in something vast, oceanic.

Robert Walpole, the country’s first prime minister, warned that the dearth of crews had rendered a third of the Navy’s ships unusable. “Oh! seamen, seamen, seamen!” he cried at a meeting.

The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James’s Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. “Only a crown, Madam,” he replied with a thin smile.

The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho ought to produce it even more powerfully. But they do not. Nor do they even arouse particularly strong reader responses. Novelists like Charlotte Brontë or D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, are able quite quickly to provoke marked reactions of sympathy or hostility from readers. The reason, apparently, is that the narrator's personality is communicating itself through the style with unusual directness.

and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.

Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda. Manfred had contracted a marriage for his son with the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, Isabella; and she had already been delivered by her guardians into the hands of Manfred, that he might celebrate the wedding as soon as Conrad’s infirm state of health would permit.

This person was standing under Lavery’s portrait of Lady Walpole-Wilson, painted at the time of her marriage, in a white dress and blue sash, a picture he was examining with the air of one trying to fill in the seconds before introductions begin to take place, rather than on account of a deep interest in art.

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes ; Sully's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey ; Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor Johnson ; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times ; Lamb; Landor ; and De Quincey ;- a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.

Historic justice is due to all characters. Who would not vindicate Henry the Eighth or Charles the Second, if found to be falsely traduced? Why then not Richard the Third?

There is no good crying about the matter. Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson and that is the end of it.

Look, my Lord! see, Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!” “Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs,” said Manfred, advancing again to seize the Princess.

No one ever did anything mean to anyone else yet save for their good, and so it will be until the end of this frail planet. "The Staircase

The wisest prophets make sure of the event first.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel...but a comedy for those who think

As I never wear a hat myself, it is indifferent to me what sort of hat I don't wear.

I desired you once before,” said Manfred angrily, “not to name that woman: from this hour she must be a stranger to you, as she must be to me.  In short, Isabella, since I cannot give you my son, I offer you myself.

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.

Repertitious has not had nearly the success in entering the language that serendipitous has had, most likely because its PR team isn’t nearly as good. The noun form of the latter, serendipity, was made up in the 1750s by the novelist Horace Walpole, based on Serendip (a former name for Sri Lanka). Repertitious, on the other hand, has its first mention in Thomas Blount’s dictionary of 1656. Writers—1, lexicographers—0. Resentient

All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural. The Greek historians have no advantage over the Peruvian, but in the beauty of their language, or from that language being more familiar to us. Mango Capac, the son of the sun, is as authentic a founder of a royal race, as the progenitor of the Heraclidae. What truth indeed could be expected, when even the identity of person is uncertain? The actions of one were ascribed to many, and of many to one. It is not known whether there was a single Hercules or twenty.

She was young enough and inexperienced enough to make many demands upon life - that it should be romantic, that it should, in the issues that it presented, be honest and open and clear, that it should allow her to settle her own place in it without any hurt to anyone else, that it should, in fact, arrange any number of compromises to suit herself and that it should nevertheless be so honest that it would admit of no compromises at all. She approached life with all the reckless boldness of one who has never come into direct contact with it.

It occurred to me some years ago, that the picture of Richard the Third, as drawn by historians, was a character formed by prejudice and invention. I did not take Shakespeare's tragedy for a genuine representation, but I did take the story of that reign for a tragedy of imagination.

If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as to never go into Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage." - To George Montagu, Esq., August 26, 1749

No, Isabella,” said the Princess, “I should not deserve this incomparable parent, if the inmost recesses of my soul harboured a thought without her permission—nay, I have offended her; I have suffered a passion to enter my heart without her avowal—but here I disclaim it; here I vow to heaven and her—

Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.

I come," replied he, "to thee, Manfred, usurper of the principality of Otranto, from the renowned and invincible Knight, the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre: in the name of his Lord, Frederic, Marquis of Vicenza, he demands the Lady Isabella, daughter of that Prince, whom thou hast basely and traitorously got into thy power, by bribing her false guardians during his absence; and he requires thee to resign the principality of Otranto, which thou hast usurped from the said Lord Frederic, the nearest of blood to the last rightful Lord, Alfonso the Good. If thou dost not instantly comply with these just demands, he defies thee to single combat to the last extremity.

I wonder whether you have Hugh Walpole's latest book?' said Mrs Penn. 'I feel in the mood this week for something epic, something BIG. Now Walpole, you know, I consider a really GREAT writer, I put him second only to Galsworthy. There's something so BIG about him. And yet he's so human with it.' 'And so essentially English,' said Gordon. 'Oh, of course! So essentially English!' 'I b'lieve I'll jest 'ave The Way of an Eagle over again,' said Mrs Weaver finally. 'You don't never seem to get tired of The Way of an Eagle, do you, now?' 'It's certainly astonishingly popular,' said Gordon, diplomatically, his eye on Mrs Penn. 'Oh, asTONishingly!' echoed Mrs Penn, ironically, her eye on Gordon.

THE FOLLOWING WORK was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian.

Resisting intense commercial pressure, Walpole’s government had drafted an Act of Quarantine to keep out vessels suspected of carrying the disease. An author in the government’s pay believed to be Defoe rose vigorously to the Act’s defence in a series of ten articles for the Daily Post, Mist’s Journal, and Applebee’s Journal, signing himself ‘Quarantine’... Opinion was duly swayed and the Act of Quarantine gained the royal assent on 12 February 1722. Four days earlier, Defoe had published his first major work on plague, Due Preparations for the Plague, as well for the Soul as Body, and in the spring its blend of medicine and piety suffused the grand historical fiction that is A Journal of the Plague Year. If the Marseilles plague gave Defoe a publishing opportunity that had been simmering for years, it also spawned a wealth of new material for him to recycle or refute (David Roberts)

The Westcotts lived in the parish of the strange wild clergyman whose church looked over the sea; strange and wild in the eyes of Treliss because he was a giant in size and had a long flowing beard, because he kept a perfect menagerie of animals in his little house by the church, and because he talked in such an odd wild way about God being in the sea and the earth rather than in the hearts of the Treliss citizens—all these things odd enough and sometimes, early in the morning, he might be seen, mother-naked, going down the path to the sea to bathe, which was hardly decent considering his great size and the immediate neighbourhood of the high road.

Peter never cared anything for the words or the deeds of old Parlow…. But Frosted Moses! … he had lived for ever, and people said that he could never die. Peter had heard that he had been in the Ark with Noah, and he had often wished to ask him questions about that interesting period, about Ham, Shem and Japheth, and about the animals. Of course, therefore, he knew everything about Life, and this remark of his about Courage was worth considering. Peter watched him very solemnly and noticed how his white beard shone in the fire-light, how there was a red handkerchief falling out of one enormous pocket, and how there was a big silver ring on one brown and bony finger …

Tisn't life that matters! 'Tis the courage you bring to it" … this from old Frosted Moses in the warm corner by the door. There might have been an answer, but Dicky Tasset, the Town Idiot, filled in the pause with the tale that he was telling Mother Figgis. "And I ran—a mile or more with the stars dotted all over the ground for yer pickin', as yer might say…." A little boy, Peter Westcott, heard what old Frosted Moses had said, and turned it over in his mind. He was twelve years old, was short and thick-necked, and just now looked very small because he was perched on so high a chair. It was one of the four ancient chairs that Sam Figgis always kept in the great kitchen behind the taproom.

Stephen Brant, the most wonderful person in the world! Always, through life, Peter must have his most wonderful person, and sometimes those Heroes knew of it and lived up to his worshipping and sometimes they knew of it and could not live up to it, but most frequently they never knew because Peter did not let them see. This Hero worship is at the back of a great deal that happened to Peter, of a great deal of his sorrow, and of all of his joy, and he would not have been Peter without it; very often these Heroes, poor things, came tumbling from their pedestals, often they came, in very shame, down of their own accord, and perhaps of them all Stephen only was worthy of his elevation, and he never knew that he was elevated.

I could do it beautifully," she agreed, "if I had time. D'you know, Char, I once heard a woman say that to Mr. Walpole. It was a dull dinner, a dreadfully dull dinner. 'I admire your books so much,' she told him gushingly, 'I could write too if only I had time. I've always wanted to write, you know, but I have such a busy life that I scarcely have time to write my letters. I have five dogs, you see, and really I never have a moment to myself.' 'The dogs are more fortunate than we,' he replied gravely. I thought it was a lovely answer.

Hugh Walpole met him at Marie Stopes’s house in Norbury: ‘something of a shock. How astonished was I when this rather bent, crooked-bodied, hideous old man came into the room. How could he ever have been beautiful, for he has a nose as ugly as Cyrano’s with a dead-white bulbous end?’ Douglas talked nonstop, in a shrill voice. ‘When someone he hates like Wells is mentioned, he gets so angry that all his crooked features light up and his nose achieves a sort of sombre glow

Acknowledgements Reading Group Notes Timeline About the Author By Ian Rankin Copyright Serendipity. According to the dictionary, it means the ability to make ‘happy chance finds’. Serendip was the old name for Ceylon. Horace Walpole is credited with coining the term, after the fairy tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, whose titular heroes were always stumbling across things they weren’t looking for.

The lively, gleaming little Jewess in a scarlet frock, who came into the room on the heels of Lady Anne, was announced as ‘Miss Manasch’, and addressed by the Walpole-Wilsons as ‘Rosie’. Both

Clio is one of the most glorious of the Muses; but, as everyone knows, she (like her sister Melpomene) suffers from a sad defect: she is apt to be pompous. With her buskins, her robes, and her airs of importance she is at times, indeed, almost intolerable. But fortunately the Fates have provided a corrective. They have decreed that in her stately advances she should be accompanied by certain apish, impish creatures, who run round her tittering, pulling long noses, threatening to trip the good lady up, and even sometimes whisking to one side the corner of her drapery, and revealing her undergarments in a most indecorous manner. They are the diarists and letter-writers, the gossips and journalists of the past, the Pepyses and Horace Walpoles and Saint-Simons, whose function it is to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history itself was once real life.