Top 500 Alexander Pope Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Ah! why, ye Gods, should two and two make four?”

— Alexander Pope

352. “Age and want sit smiling at the gate.”

— Alexander Pope

353. “What riches give us let us then inquire: Meat, fire, and clothes. What more? Meat, clothes, and fire. Is this too little?”

— Alexander Pope

354. “Behold the groves that shine with silver frost, their beauty withered, and their verdure lost!”

— Alexander Pope

355. “The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole Can never be a mouse of any soul.”

— Alexander Pope

356. “Is not absence death to those who love?”

— Alexander Pope

357. “What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.”

— Alexander Pope

358. “Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.”

— Alexander Pope

359. “Tis all in vain to keep a constant pother About one vice and fall into another.”

— Alexander Pope

360. “What Conscience dictates to be done, Or warns me not to do; This teach me more than Hell to shun, That more than Heav’n pursue.”

— Alexander Pope

361. “Thus God and nature linked the gen’ral frame, And bade self-love and social be the same.”

— Alexander Pope

362. “A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn.”

— Alexander Pope

363. “All chance, direction, which thou canst not see.”

— Alexander Pope

364. “Nor Fame I slight, nor for her favors call; She comes unlooked for, if she comes at all .”

— Alexander Pope

365. “What is it to be wise? ‘Tis but to know how little can be known, To see all others’ faults, and feel our own.”

— Alexander Pope

366. “The blest to-day is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago.”

— Alexander Pope

367. “Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?”

— Alexander Pope

368. “Who pants for glory, finds but short repose; A breath revives him, or a breath o’erthrows.”

— Alexander Pope

369. “What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread, Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head? What if the head, the eye, or ear repined To serve mere engines to the ruling mind?”

— Alexander Pope

370. “When I die, I should be ashamed to leave enough to build me a monument if there were a wanting friend above ground. I would enjoy the pleasure of what I give by giving it alive and seeing another enjoy it.”

— Alexander Pope

371. “For I, who hold sage Homer’s rule the best, Welcome the coming, speed the going guest.”

— Alexander Pope

372. “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

373. “At every trifle take offense, that always shows great pride or little sense.”

— Alexander Pope

374. “See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form’d and impell’d its neighbor to embrace.”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

376. “Simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.”

— Alexander Pope

377. “Who dies in youth and vigour, dies the best.”

— Alexander Pope

378. “Oh! be thou blest with all that Heaven can send, Long health, long youth, long pleasure-and a friend.”

— Alexander Pope

379. “But touch me, and no minister so sore. Whoe’er offends, at some unlucky time Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme, Sacred to ridicule his whole life long, And the sad burthen of some merry song.”

— Alexander Pope

380. “Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof who merit praise.”

— Alexander Pope

381. “Sure of their qualities and demanding praise, more go to ruined fortunes than are raised.”

— Alexander Pope

382. “We may see the small value God has for riches, by the people he gives them to.”

— Alexander Pope

383. “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

384. “A brave man thinks no one his superior who does him an injury, for he has it then in his power to make himself superior to the other by forgiving it.”

— Alexander Pope

385. “These riches are possess’d, but not enjoy’d!”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

387. “The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.”

— Alexander Pope

388. “No craving void left aching in the soul.”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

390. “As with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring out.”

— Alexander Pope

391. “But see how oft ambition’s aims are cross’d, and chiefs contend ’til all the prize is lost!”

— Alexander Pope

392. “But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?”

— Alexander Pope

393. “Wit is the lowest form of humor.”

— Alexander Pope

394. “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

395. “True disputants are like true sportsmen: their whole delight is in the pursuit.”

— Alexander Pope

396. “Passions are the gales of life.”

— Alexander Pope

397. “In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From pois’nous herbs extracts the healing dew?”

— Alexander Pope

398. “With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought.”

— Alexander Pope

399. “Whenever I find a great deal of gratitude in a poor man, I take it for granted there would be as much generosity if he were a rich man.”

— Alexander Pope

400. “Tis use alone that sanctifies expense And splendor borrow all her rays from sense.”

— Alexander Pope