Alexander Pope Quotes and Quotation

• How oft, when press'd to marriage, have I said,
  Curse on all laws but those which love has made!
  Love, free as air at sight of human ties,
  Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.
• Eloisa to Abelard

• Let wealth, let honour, wait the wedded dame,
  August her deed, and sacred be her fame;
  Before true passion all those views remove,
  Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?
• Eloisa to Abelard

• How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
  The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
  Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
  Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd...
• Eloisa to Abelard

• Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old:
  It is the rust we value, not the gold.
  • Source: Imitation of Horace

• Say, is not absence death to those who love?
  • Source: Autumn

• Let opening roses knotted oaks adorn,
    And liquid amber drop from every thorn.
  • Autumn l. 36

• The garlands fade, the vows are worn away;
    So dies her love, and so my hopes decay.
  • Autumn (l. 70)

Essay on Criticism

• A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
  There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
  And drinking largely sobers us again.

• Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

• One science only will one genius fit:
  So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

• 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
  But the joint force and full result of all.

• Of all the causes which conspire to blind
  Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind;
  What the weak head with strongest bias rules,—
  Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
  • Part II, Line 1

• To err is human, to forgive divine.
  • Part II, Line 325

• Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
  • Part III, line 66

Essay on Man (1733-1734)

• Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
  The proper study of mankind is man.

• Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.

• All Nature is art, unknown to thee;
  All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
  All discord, harmony not understood;
  All partial evil, universal good;
  And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite
  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

• Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
  Man never is, but always to be blest.
  The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
  Rests and expatiates in a life to come."
  • Epistle i, Line 95

• In lazy apathy let stoics boast
  Their virtue fix'd: 'tis fix'd as in a frost;
  Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
  But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.
  • Epistle ii, Line 101

• In faith and hope the world will disagree,
  But all mankind's concern is charity.
  • Epistle iii, Line 203

• O happiness! our being's end and aim!
  Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name:
  That something still which prompts the eternal sigh,
  For which we bear to live, or dare to die.
  • Epistle iv, Line 1

• Order is Heaven's first law.
  • Epistle iv, Line 49

• A wit's a feather, and a chief a rod;
  An honest man's the noblest work of God.
  • Epistle iv, Line 247

• Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?
  All fear, none aid you, and few understand.
  • Epistle iv, Line 261

• Know then this truth (enough for man to know),—
  Virtue alone is happiness below.
  • Epistle iv, Line 309

The Universal Prayer (1738)

• Thou Great First Cause, least understood
  Who all my sense confined
  To know but this, that Thou art good
  And that myself am blind.

• Let not this weak, unknowing hand
  Presume Thy bolts to throw,
  And teach damnation round the land
  On each I judge Thy foe.

• If I am right, Thy grace import
  Still in the right to stay;
  If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
  To find that better way!

• Teach me to feel another's woe,
  To right the fault I see;
  That mercy I to others show,
  That mercy show to me.

Attributed:

• A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state. While Cato gives his little senate laws, What bosom beats not in his country’s cause?

• A generous friendship no cold medium knows, Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.

• A gen’rous heart repairs a sland’rous tongue.

• A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

• A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

• A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.

• A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

• Achilles absent was Achilles still.

• All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

• An honest man's the noblest work of God.

• And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

• And for our country’t is a bliss to die.

• And love the offender, yet detest the offence.

• And what he greatly thought, he nobly dar’d.

• And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.

• Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old.

• Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

• Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.

• Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

• But blind to former as to future fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state?

• But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

• Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

• Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice — A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

• Condemned whole years in absence to deplore, And image charms he must behold no more.

• Cursed be the verse, how well so e’er it flow, That tends to make one worthy man my foe.

• Die and endow a college or a cat.

• Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.

• Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

• Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men.

• For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

• For love deceives the best of womankind.

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

• For too much rest itself becomes a pain.

• Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

• Gentle of speech, beneficent of mind.

• Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace; If not, by any means get wealth and place.

• Give me again my hollow tree, A crust of bread, and liberty.

• Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.

• Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

• He best can paint them who shall feel them most.

• He serves me most who serves his country best.

• He who tells a lie is not sensible of how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.

• Health consists with temperance alone.

• Heaven first taught letters for some wretch’s aid, Some banish’d lover, or some captive maid.

• Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib’d, their present state.

• Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

• Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

• How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

• I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

• I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

• In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.

• In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

• In youth and beauty wisdom is but rare!

• Injustice, swift, erect, and unconfin’d, Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind.

• Is not absence death to those who love?

• It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise. 'Tis more by art than force of num’rous strokes.

• It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow necked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

• Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

• Learn to live well, or fairly make your will; you played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill: walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage: leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.

• Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O grave! where is thy victory? O death! where is thy sting?

• Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.

• Love, free as air at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.

• Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

• Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, Tenets with books, and principles with times.

• Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.

• Men dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake.

• Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot.

• Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.

• Never find fault with the absent.

• Not hate, but glory, made these chiefs contend; And each brave foe was in his soul a friend.

• Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

• Of all the causes which conspire to blind, Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the mind; What the weak head with strongest bias rules— Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

• On life's vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

• On wrongs swift vengeance waits.

• One simile that solitary shines, In the dry desert of a thousand lines.

• One who is too wise an observer of the business of others, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.

• Order is heaven's first law.

• Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

• Party-spirit at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

• Passions are the gales of life.

• Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs, Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.

• Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.
  • Variant: Praise undeserv’d is scandal in disguise.

• Pride is still aiming at the best houses: Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, the angels fell; aspiring to be angels men rebel.

• Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words— health, peace, and competence.

• Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

• Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.

• Short is my date, but deathless my renown.

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

• So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

• Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

• Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

• Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.

• The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

• The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

• The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

• The most positive men are the most credulous.

• The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

• 'Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's incln'd.

• 'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

• 'Tis man’s to fight, but Heaven’s to give success.

• 'Tis true,’tis certain; man though dead retains, Part of himself: the immortal mind remains.

• 'Tis with our judgments as our watches — none, Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

• To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

• To know ourselves diseased is half our cure.

• To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

• True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.’T is not enough no harshness gives offence— The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

• True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can.

• Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

• Two friends, two bodies with one soul inspir’d.

• What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.

• What's fame? a fancy'd life in other's breath. A thing beyond us, even before our death.

• Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?

• Who dies in youth and vigour, dies the best.

• Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

• Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.

• Wit is the lowest form of humor.

• Woman's at best a contradiction still.

• Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

You Can Find quotes about Alexander Pope, Famous quotes on Alexander Pope, Quotation from Alexander Pope.

	Web www.E-paranoids.com