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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

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Horace Walpole
Age: 79 †
Born: 1717
Born: September 24
Died: 1797
Died: March 2
Autobiographer
Novelist
Politician
Writer
London
England
Sir Horace Walpole
Horatio Walpole
1st Baron Walpole
Horace Walpole
Earl of Orford
Onuphrio Muralto
Horatio Walpole
4th Earl of Orford
Horatio Walpole
Nature
Rarely
Mercenary
Give
Generally
Approve
Firsts
Anger
Hints
First
Advice
Suggests
Giving
Interested
Measures
Good
Thoughts
Resentment
Second
Passions
Passion
Seldom

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Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I'd place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs.
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The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
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The whole [Scotch] nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.
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How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
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The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.
Horace Walpole
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The prosecution of [Warren] Hastings, though he should escape at last, must have good effect. It will alarm the servants of the Company in India, that they may not always plunder with impunity, but that there may be a retrospect and it will show them that even bribes of diamonds to the Crown may not secure them from prosecution.
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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.
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Ponder, your comedies are woeful chaff: Write tragedies, when you would make us laugh.
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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.
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When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.
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Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.
Horace Walpole
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Had I children, my utmost endeavors would be to make them musicians.
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Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
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My aversion to them...springs from the perniciousness of that sect to society-I hate Papists, as a man, not as a Protestant. If Papists were only enemies to the religion of other men, I should overlook their errors. As they are foes to liberty, I cannot forgive them.
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[The] taste [of the French] is too timid to be true taste--or is but half taste.
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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.
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Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.
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History is a romance that is believed romance, a history that is not believed.
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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
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Serendipitous discoveries are made by chance, found without looking for them but possible only through a sharp vision and sagacity, ready to see the unexpected and never indulgent with the apparently unexplainable.
Horace Walpole