Heaven first taught letters for some wretch’s aid, Some banish’d lover, or some captive maid.
Alexander Pope
Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, Tenets with books, and principles with times.
Alexander Pope
’T is true,’t is certain; man though dead retains, Part of himself: the immortal mind remains.
Alexander Pope
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
Alexander Pope
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O grave! where is thy victory? O death! where is thy sting?
Alexander Pope
Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words — health, peace, and competence.
Alexander Pope
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib’d, their present state.
Alexander Pope
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
Alexander Pope
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.
Alexander Pope
It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise.’T is more by art than force of num’rous strokes.
Alexander Pope
Stuff the head, With all such reading as was never read: For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, goddess, and about it.
Alexander Pope
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.
Alexander Pope
A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope
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?
Alexander Pope
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.
Alexander Pope
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.
Alexander Pope
Like leaves on trees the race of man is found — Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; Another race the following spring supplies: They fall successive, and successive rise.
Alexander Pope
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.
Alexander Pope
All nature is but 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.
Alexander Pope