Horace Walpole Men Quotations

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.

What is called chance is the instrument of Providence and the secret agent that counteracts what men call wisdom, and preserves order and regularity, and continuation in the whole, for ... I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery; and therefore if we could correct the world to our fancies, and with the best intentions imaginable, probably we should only produce more misery and confusion.

I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy.

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.

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

Men are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

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.

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.

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.

I have known men of valor cowards to their wives.

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.

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.