Alexander Pope Quotes

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

I only know about a few things, but I am quite good at bluffing. There are a whole range of subjects, including the Renaissance, which I am prepared to sound expert on.

I see the beard and cloak, but I don't yet see a philosopher.

By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mekancholy.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

It's all a farce, - these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o'er field and dell, Because the year is dying.

Be not caught by the cunning of those who appear in a disguise.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

You can hide as cleverly as you like, but in the final analysis mimicry is deception, pure and simple. It doesn't solve a thing.

What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

Vice knows [its] ugly, so [it] puts on [a] mask.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

I have heard what poets write about women. They rhyme and rhapsodize and lie. I have watched sailors on the shore stare mutely at the slow-rolling swell of the sea. I have watched old soldiers with hearts like leather grow teary-eyed at their king's colors stretched against the wind. Listen to me: these men know nothing of love. You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music. A trouper knows.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

All in green went my love riding