Alexander Pope Quotes

552 Sourced Quotes

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
The time shall come, when, free as seas or wind, Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind, Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, And seas but join the regions they divide; Earth's distant ends our glory shall behold, And the new world launch forth to seek the old.

Alexander Pope
In every work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend.

Alexander Pope
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.

Alexander Pope
The hog that ploughs not, not obeys thy call, Lives on the labours of this lord of all.

Alexander Pope
To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise!

Alexander Pope
A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.

Alexander Pope
The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are?

Alexander Pope
For when success a lover's toil attends,Few ask, if fraud or force attain'd his ends

Alexander Pope
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.

Alexander Pope