Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Popewas an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verse, as well as for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the second-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 May 1688
passion fool sincere
Search then the ruling passion; there alone, The wild are constant, and the cunning known; The fool consistent, and the false sincere; Priests, princes, women, no dissemblers here.
law order heaven
Order is Heaven's first law; and this confess, Some are and must be greater than the rest.
mind padlocks talent
Whate'er the talents, or howe'er designed, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.
alps hills arise
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.
stars war fall
There various news I heard of love and strife,Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,The fall of favourites, projects of the great,Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.
blood hands play
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleas'd to the last he crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
strong men thinking
I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad Poets. What we call a Genius, is hard to be distinguish'd by a man himself, from a strong inclination: and if his genius be ever so great, he can not at first discover it any other way, than by giving way to that prevalent propensity which renders him the more liable to be mistaken.
sports men unhappy
Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man's unhappy, God's unjust.
believe noise abundance
When rumours increase, and when there is an abundance of noise and clamour, believe the second report.
thinking vices strange
Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.
rome years broken
See the wild Waste of all-devouring years! How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears, With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead!
queens eye past
In various talk th' instructive hours they past, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies.
dark thinking calm
Calm, thinking villains, whom no faith could fix, Of crooked counsels and dark politics.
men divine-justice ideas
At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.