"If the heart of a man is depressed with cares, The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears; Like the notes of a fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the spirits, and charms our ears."

"How happy could I be with either, Were t' other dear charmer away!"

"Brother, brother! we are both in the wrong."

"The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets."

"Fill ev'ry glass, for wine inspires us, And fires us With courage, love and joy. Women and wine should life employ. Is there ought else on earth desirous?"

"Macheath: And I would love you all the day, Polly: Every night would kiss and play, Macheath: If with me you’d fondly stray Polly: Over the hills and far away."

"Were I laid on Greenland’s Coast, And in my Arms embrac’d my Lass; Warm amidst eternal Frost, Too soon the Half Year’s Night would pass."

"O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed, By keeping men off, you keep them on."

"Can you support the expense of a husband, hussy, in gaming, drinking and whoring? Have you money enough to carry on the daily quarrels of man and wife about who shall squander most? There are not many husbands and wives, who can bear the charges of plaguing one another in a handsome way."

"'Twas when the seas were roaring With hollow blasts of wind, A damsel lay deploring, All on a rock reclined."

"Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?"

"How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards."

"You know, my Dear, I never meddle in matters of Death; I always leave those Affairs to you. Women indeed are bitter bad Judges in these cases, for they are so partial to the Brave that they think every Man handsome who is going to the Camp or the Gallows."

"Over the hills and far away."

"'T is woman that seduces all mankind; By her we first were taught the wheedling arts."

"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."

"As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope."

"There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope."

"Of all his works he was most proud of his garden."

"He is in my opinion the most elegant, the most correct poet; and at the same time the most harmonious...that England ever gave birth to."

"In Pope, I cannot read a line, But with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six: It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, Pox take him, and his wit."

"The verses, when they were written, resemble nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon such passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against."

"I have entered into these particulars with respect to the Essay on Man, partly with a view of illustrating the distinction already hinted at between the two different forms in which the system of optimism has been proposed, and partly to have an opportunity of directing the attention of my readers to the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry which our language affords; and which, with the exception of a very few passages, contains a valuable summary of all that human reason has been able hitherto to advance in justification of the moral government of God."

"Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope—and you can't."

"Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had Invention, by which new trains of events are formed and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in The Rape of the Lock, and by which extrinsick and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism; he had Imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind and enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest, and the Ethick Epistles; he had Judgement, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and, by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality; and he had colours of language always before him ready to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression, as when he accommodates his diction to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer's sentiments and descriptions."

"Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, and therefore always endeavoured to do his best: he did not court the candour, but dared the judgement of his reader, and, expecting no indulgence from others, he shewed none to himself. He examined lines and words with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven."

"Pope was not a classic of prose; he wrote almost exclusively in a highly finished artistic verse, which may evade the romantic formulas, but is either poetry or nothing."

"The Messiah (of 1712) reached a pitch of polished, resonant rhetoric hitherto undreamed of, and was a "copy of verses" which became the model and the despair of five generations of poets."

"The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) lifted Pope at once to the first rank of living European poets. In lightness of handling, in elegance of badinage, in exquisite amenity of style—that is to say, in the very qualities which Latin Europe had hitherto, and not without justice, denied us—the little British barbarian surpassed all foreign competitors. This is the turning-point of English subserviency to French taste. Pope and his school had closely studied their Boileau, and had learned their lesson well, so well that for the future England is no longer the ape of the French, but is competent, more and more confidently as the century descends, to give examples to the polite world."

"For more than thirty years Pope was so completely the centre of poetical attention in England that he may almost be said to have comprised the poetry of his time. There is no second instance of an English poet preserving for so long a period a supremacy comparable to his. It is possible to defend the position that one or two other versemen of the age did some particular thing better than Pope, though even this requires argument; but it is quite certain that he alone excelled over a wide range of subjects."

"Who is this Pope that I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose?"

"The little gentleman ... with a most comical and unparalleled assurance, has undertaken to translate Homer from Greek, of which he does not know one word, into English, which he understands almost as little."

"A young, squab, short gentleman, whose outward form, though it should be that of downright monkey, would not differ so much from human shape as his unthinking immaterial part does from human understanding. ... As there is no creature in nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back'd toad. ... This little author may extol the ancients as much and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern. For had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems,—the life of half a day."

"The Iliad and the Odyssey, in his hands, have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them."

"This beautiful passage [The Rape of the Lock, Canto 5, lines 25-32], from the most beautiful of poets, which ought to be fastened in large print upon every lady's dressing table, the American women, of all ranks, seem to have by heart."

"I look upon a proper appreciation of Pope as a touchstone of taste."

"The most beautiful of poets."

"We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the splendid high-priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable... Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose."

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

"The sick in body call for aid: the sick In mind are covetous of more disease; And when at worst, they dream themselves quite well. To know ourselves diseased, is half our cure."

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."

"Never find fault with the absent."

"Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain. Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise! Each stamps its image as the other flies!"

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come; Knock as you please, there's nobody at home."

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

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

"A god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature."

"True politeness consists in the being easy one-self, and making every body about one as easy as we can."

"This is the Jew That Shakespeare drew."