A Quote by Horace Walpole

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

Quote Topics

Age Attained Correction Easily Education Enlightened Force Grandeur Improved Leads Might More Nature Nothing Purity Shakespeare Suppose Would

Quote Author

Horace Walpole
English - Celebrity
September 24, 1717 - March 2, 1797

People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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.

Horace Walpole

It is commonly the personal character of a writer which gives him his public significance. It is not imparted by his genius. Napoleon said of Corneille, "Were he living I would make him a king;" but he did not read him. He read Racine, yet he said nothing of the kind of Racine.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf

Few have attained to consummate wisdom in the perfection of philosophy: Solomon attained to it, and Aristotle in relation to his times, and in a later age Avicenna, and in our own days the recently deceased Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, and Adam Marsh.

Roger Bacon

I have indeed - praise be to God - attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the earth, and i have attained in this respect what no other person has attained to my knowledge.

Ibn Battuta

"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

Robert Browning

The wonderful thing about the theater is that it can emphasize BOTH our diversity AND our common humanity. In many ways, the world of Shakespeare (or Aeschylus or Racine) is totally different from our world; and yet any human being can look through the differences in dress and mores and discover our common problems, passions, and potentials.

Howard Gardner

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.

John F. Kennedy

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

John Irving

Although I have been doing plays since I was 8 years old, it was only when I started doing Shakespeare at age 19 at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival that I felt like my career started.

Carrie Preston

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Christopher Hitchens

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

H. L. Mencken

I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.