A biography for Horace Walpolehasn’t been written yet.
“We often repent of our first thoughts, and scarce ever of our second.”
“The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.”
“I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.”
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.”
“By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.”
“In science, mistakes always precede the truth.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon.”
“When a Frenchman reads of the garden of Eden, I do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of Versailles, with clipped hedges, berceaus, and trellis work.”
“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”