I am not usually given to quotes and quoting. I very rarely read biographies though some notable human beings are worth knowing about and many who are not well known should come more to our attention.
Horace probably isn’t a man I would have known well. He loved things Gothic and whilst his father was a famed British politician, Horace didn’t go looking for causes, they rather found him. And he was a member of the British aristocracy which means he was probably highly educated and not much else.
But when I first read this quote, it struck a chord with me and I have never forgotten it. It comes from a book of quotations we have here printed in the 1900’s, filled with thousands of people’s ideas none of which I ever recall, save this by Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert Walpole and 4th Earl of Orford from a letter to Anne, Countess of Ossory, on 16 August 1776:
“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.”