Alexander Pope - An Essay on Man

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For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administered is best.

Alexander Pope
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.

Alexander Pope
The starving chemist in his golden views Supremely blest.

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
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.

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

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

Alexander Pope
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, He bounds, connects and equals all!

Alexander Pope
Reason, however able, cool at best, Cares not for service, or but serves when prest, Stays till we call, and then not often near.

Alexander Pope
Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man's unhappy, God's unjust.

Alexander Pope
He, who through vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied Being peoples every star, May tell why Heaven has made us as we are...

Alexander Pope
Who pants for glory, finds but short repose; A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows.

Alexander Pope
Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribed, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below?

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

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

Alexander Pope
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

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

Alexander Pope
Who finds not Providence all good and wise, Alike in what it gives, and what denies.

Alexander Pope
Never elated while one man's oppress'd;
Never dejected while another's blessed.

Alexander Pope
Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul;
Reason's comparing balance rules the whole.
Man, but for that no action could attend,
And, but for this, were active to no end:
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot;
Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro' the void,
Destroying others, by himself destroy'd.

Alexander Pope
So man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Alexander Pope
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate and rot.

Alexander Pope
Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us, since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die, Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan.

Alexander Pope
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Alexander Pope
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

Alexander Pope
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.

Alexander Pope
Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow; The rest is all but leather or prunella.

Alexander Pope
Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.

Alexander Pope
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

Alexander Pope
The learn'd is happy nature to explore,
The fool is happy that he knows no more.

Alexander Pope