Alexander Pope Quotes

552 Sourced Quotes

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleas'd to the last he crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

Alexander Pope
Intestine war no more our passions wage,
And giddy factions bear away their rage.

Alexander Pope
Say, will the falcon, stooping from above, Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove? Admires the jay the insect's gilded wings? Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?

Alexander Pope
Women use lovers as they do cards; they play with them a while, and when they have got all they can by them, throw them away, call for new ones, and then perhaps lose by the new all they got by the old ones.

Alexander Pope
Grave authors say, and witty poets sing, That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.

Alexander Pope
The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife gives all the strength and color of our life.

Alexander Pope
Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.

Alexander Pope
No silver saints, by dying misers giv'n, Here brib'd the rage of ill-requited heav'n; But such plain roofs as Piety could raise, And only vocal with the Maker's praise.

Alexander Pope
Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme,
Happy to catch me, just at dinner-time.

Alexander Pope
Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.

Alexander Pope
Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes;
And when in act they cease, in prospect rise.

Alexander Pope
And each blasphemer quite escape the rod, Because the insult's not on man, but God?

Alexander Pope
Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skillful hands; in unskillful, the most mischievous.

Alexander Pope
The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is, that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool.

Alexander Pope
Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense.

Alexander Pope
Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from infinite to Thee, From Thee to nothing.

Alexander Pope
The grave unites; where e'en the great find rest, And blended lie th' oppressor and th' oppressed!

Alexander Pope
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven, And though no science, fairly worth the seven.

Alexander Pope
By the streams that ever flow, By the fragrant winds that blow O'er the Elysian flow'rs; By those happy souls who dwell In yellow mead of asphodel.

Alexander Pope
For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.

Alexander Pope
Of little use, the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose;
Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place
And speak in public with some sort of grace?

Alexander Pope
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, and fills up all the mighty void of sense.

Alexander Pope
Jarring interests of themselves create the according music of a well-mixed state.

Alexander Pope
It is very natural for a young friend and a young lover to think the persons they love have nothing to do but to please them.

Alexander Pope
Oft in dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Alexander Pope
Music the fiercest grief can charm,
And fate's severest rage disarm. Music can soften pain to ease,
And make despair and madness please;
Our joys below it can improve,
And antedate the bliss above.

Alexander Pope
Mark what unvary'd laws preserve each state, Laws wise as Nature, and as fixed as Fate.

Alexander Pope
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; The centre mov'd, a circle straight succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads.

Alexander Pope
When two people compliment each other with the choice of anything, each of them generally gets that which he likes least.

Alexander Pope
And soften'd sounds along the waters die: Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.

Alexander Pope