Top 500 Alexander Pope Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “Tis all in vain to keep a constant pother About one vice and fall into another.”

— Alexander Pope

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

358. “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

359. “At ev’ry word a reputation dies.”

— Alexander Pope

360. “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

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

364. “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

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

368. “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

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

374. “A fly, a grape-stone, or a hair can kill.”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

379. “Truth needs not flowers of speech.”

— Alexander Pope

380. “Passions are the gales of life.”

— Alexander Pope

381. “If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.”

— Alexander Pope

382. “Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.”

— Alexander Pope

383. “Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?”

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

— Alexander Pope

386. “Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

388. “Atheists put on false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear.”

— Alexander Pope

389. “And little eagles wave their wings in gold.”

— Alexander Pope

390. “Intestine war no more our passions wage, And giddy factions bear away their rage.”

— Alexander Pope

391. “What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards.”

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

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

— Alexander Pope

394. “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

395. “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

396. “Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?”

— Alexander Pope

397. “Men would be angels, angels would be gods.”

— Alexander Pope

398. “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

399. “Unblemish’d let me live or die unknown; Oh, grant an honest fame, or grant me none!”

— Alexander Pope

400. “Those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”

— Alexander Pope