Top 100 Walpole Quotes
#1. I think it was Harry Walpole who remarked, In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.
Stephen Fry
#2. Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? ... Manual labour.
George Bernard Shaw
#3. The official declaration of war came on October 19, 1739, with the ringing of bells and the Prince of Wales toasting the London populace outside the Rose Tavern near Temple Bar. "This is your war," Walpole told his rival the Duke of Newcastle, "and I wish you joy of it.
Arthur Herman
#4. 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.
Bill Bryson
#6. And therefore, for the sake of my mater, without any regard for my own, I hope all those that have a due regard for our constitution and for the rights and prerogatives of the crown, without which our constitution can not be preserved, will be against this motion.
Robert Walpole
#7. Letters to absence can a voice impart, And lend a tongue when distance gags the heart.
Horace Walpole
#8. When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.
Horace Walpole
#9. [A distressing event] came like a door banging on to a silent room.
Hugh Walpole
#10. Serendipity ... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.
Horace Walpole
#11. To act with common sense according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know.
Horace Walpole
#12. An ancient prophecy ... pronounced, That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it!
Horace Walpole
#13. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories
Horace Walpole
#14. The contempt of money is no more a virtue than to wash one's hand is one; but one does not willingly shake hands with a man that never washes his.
Horace Walpole
#15. Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.
Horace Walpole
#16. Cunning is neither the consequence of sense, nor does it give sense. A proof that it is not sense, is that cunning people never imagine that others can see through them. It is the consequence of weakness.
Horace Walpole
#17. The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.
Horace Walpole
#18. Gentlemen have talked a great deal of patriotism. A venerable word, when duly practiced.
Robert Walpole
#19. A bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.
Hugh Walpole
#21. 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.
Horace Walpole
#22. 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
#23. The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon any other.
Horace Walpole
#24. 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?
Horace Walpole
#25. Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
Horace Walpole
#27. Who has begun has half done. Have the courage to be wise. Begin!
Horace Walpole
#28. Lawyers and rogues are vermin not easily rooted out of a rich soil.
Horace Walpole
#29. [The] taste [of the French] is too timid to be true taste
or is but half taste.
Horace Walpole
#30. Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.
Horace Walpole
#32. Oh, do not read history, for that I know must be false.
Robert Walpole
#33. Some members of both Houses have, it is true, been removed from their employments under the Crown; but were they ever told, either by me or by any other of his majesty's servants, that it was for opposing the measures of the administration in Parliament?
Robert Walpole
#34. [Corneille] was inspired by Roman authors and Roman spirit, Racine with delicacy by the polished court of Louis XIV.
Horace Walpole
#35. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra.
Horace Walpole
#36. 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.
Horace Walpole
#37. There is nothing I hold so cheap as a learned man , except an unlearned one .
Horace Walpole
#38. Have I given any symptoms of an avaricious disposition? Have I obtained any grants from the crown since I have been placed at the head of the treasury? Has my conduct been different from that which others in the same station would have followed?
Robert Walpole
#39. Fashion is fortunately no law but to its devotees.
Horace Walpole
#40. The happiest people I have known in this world have been the Saints-and, after these, the men and women who get immediate and conscious enjoyment from little things.
Hugh Walpole
#41. Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie.
Horace Walpole
#42. It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink.
Horace Walpole
#43. How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.
Horace Walpole
#44. How much on outward show does all depend,
If virtues from within no lustre lend!
Strip off th'externals M and Y, the rest
Proves Majesty itself is but a Jest.
Horace Walpole
#45. The curse of modern times is, that almost everything does create controversy.
Horace Walpole
#46. We must cultivate our garden.
Furia to God one day in seven allots;
The other six to scandal she devotes.
Satan, by false devotion never flammed,
Bets six to one, that Furia will be damned.
Horace Walpole
#47. There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.
Horace Walpole
#48. I have lived long enough in the world, Sir, ... to know that the safety of a minister lies in his having the approbation of this House. Former ministers, Sir, neglected this, and therefore they fell; I have always made it my first study to obtain it ...
Robert Walpole
#49. I am called repeatedly and insidiously prime and sole minister.
Robert Walpole
#50. Wherever they have been arraigned, a plain charge has been exhibited against them. They have had an impartial trial and have been permitted to make their defense.
Robert Walpole
#52. I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighboring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded air of superiority.
Horace Walpole
#53. 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.
Horace Walpole
#54. Of Ickworth's boys, their father's joys,
There is but one a bad one;
The tenth is he, the parson's fee,
And indeed he is a sad one.
No love of fame, no sense of shame,
And a bad heart, let me tell ye:
Without, all brass; within, all ass,
And the puppy's name is Felly.
Horace Walpole
#56. Our [British] summers are often, though beautiful for verdure, so cold, that they are rather cold winters.
Horace Walpole
#57. Let the French but have England, and they won't want to conquer it.
Horace Walpole
#58. Code breaker Mabel Elliott's favorite quote was: It isn't life that matters! It's the courage we bring to it.
Hugh Walpole
#59. It is but refusing to gratify an unreasonable or an insolent demand, and up starts a patriot.
Robert Walpole
#60. I can not, therefore, see how this can be imputed as a crime, or how any of the king's ministers can be blamed for his doing what the public has no concern in; for if the public be well and faithfully served it has no business to ask by whom.
Robert Walpole
#61. 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.
Horace Walpole
#62. Persons extremely reserved are like old enamelled watches, which had painted covers, that hindered your seeing what o'clock it was.
Robert Walpole
#63. Happiness comes from ... some curious adjustment to life.
Hugh Walpole
#65. 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
#66. Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world.
Hugh Walpole
#67. Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.
Horace Walpole
#68. If they are really persuaded that the army is annually established by me, that I have the sole disposal of posts and honours, that I employ this power in the destruction of liberty and the diminution of commerce, let me awaken them from their delusion.
Robert Walpole
#69. Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.
Horace Walpole
#70. I have sometimes seen women, who would have been sensible enough, if they would have been content not to be called women of sense
but by aiming at what they had not, they only proved absurd
for sense cannot be counterfeited.
Horace Walpole
#71. 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
#72. The best philosophy is to do one's duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot; bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it.
Horace Walpole
#73. A careless song, with a little nonsense in it now and then, does not mis-become a monarch.
Horace Walpole
#74. Life is a tragedy for those who feel ... but a comedy for those who think
Brenda Walpole
#75. History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed.
Horace Walpole
#76. I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one.
Horace Walpole
#77. And here a most heinous charge is made, that the nation has been burdened with unnecessary expenses for the sole purpose of preventing the discharge of our debts and the abolition of taxes.
Robert Walpole
#78. Admitting, however, for the sake of argument, that I am prime and sole minister in this country, am I, therefore, prime and sole minister of all Europe? Am I answerable for the conduct of other countries as well as for that of my own?
Robert Walpole
#79. Whatever was the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned.
Robert Walpole
#80. Art and life ought to be hurriedly remarried and brought to live together.
Hugh Walpole
#81. Oh, we are ridiculous animals; and if the angels have any fun in them, how we must divert them!
Horace Walpole
#83. Fashion is always silly, for, before it can spread far, it must be calculated for silly people; as examples of sense, wit, or ingenuity could be imitated only by a few.
Horace Walpole
#84. I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery.
Horace Walpole
#85. Lord Bath used to say of women, who are apt to say that they will follow their own judgment, that they could not follow a worse guide.
Horace Walpole
#87. If a passion for freedom is not in vogue, patriots may sound the alarm till they are weary. The Act of Habeas Corpus, by which prisoners may insist on being brought to trial within a limited time, is the corner stone of our liberty.
Horace Walpole
#88. By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.
Horace Walpole
#89. We are largely the playthings of our fears. To one, fear of the dark; to another, of physical pain; to a third, of public ridicule; to a fourth, of poverty; to a fifth, of loneliness ... for all of us, our particular creature waits in ambush.
Horace Walpole
#90. One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed,
Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.
Horace Walpole
#91. I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company.
Horace Walpole
#92. The whole [Scotch] nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it.
Horace Walpole
#93. But I must think that an address to his majesty to remove one of his servants, without so much as alleging any particular crime against him, is one of the greatest encroachments that was ever made upon the prerogatives of the crown.
Robert Walpole
#94. But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.
Robert Walpole
#96. Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Horace Walpole
#97. The public treasure has been duly applied to the uses to which it was appropriated by Parliament, and regular accounts have been annually laid before Parliament, of every article of expense.
Robert Walpole
#98. Is it no imputation to be arraigned before this House, in which I have sat forty years, and to have my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy?
Robert Walpole
#99. 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?
Horace Walpole
#100. 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
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