Life & Wisdom Quote by Horace Walpole

A neat little guillotine of a sentence: think and you get comedy; feel and you get tragedy. Walpole isn’t offering a self-help mantra so much as a coded social diagnosis from the 18th-century parlor, where wit functioned as both currency and armor. The line flatters the rational observer - the person with enough distance to turn human folly into entertainment - while quietly admitting what that distance costs. Comedy here isn’t joy; it’s mastery. If you can frame life as absurd, you’re less likely to be wounded by it.

The subtext is classed and cultivated. Walpole, a Whig aristocrat with a taste for satire and gothic playacting (The Castle of Otranto practically invents a genre by treating fear as aesthetic), understood sensibility as a fashion and a vulnerability. To “feel” in his world meant being exposed: to scandal, to political chaos, to the brutalities that polite society prefers to outsource and forget. Tragedy is what happens when the buffering layer of irony fails.

What makes the line work is its cold symmetry. The paired clauses turn a messy reality into a binary - not because Walpole believes people are only thinkers or feelers, but because the split dramatizes a choice: will you interpret experience, or be interpreted by it? It also anticipates a modern posture. The internet runs on Walpolean comedy: detachment as performance, jokes as preemptive self-defense. And yet the sentence keeps its sting because everyone knows the punchline’s secret: the more you train yourself to laugh, the more you’re confessing you can’t afford to cry.