Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Pope

Admiration is loud, effortless, and often lazy; approval is quiet, earned, and selective. Pope’s line turns that distinction into a social sorting mechanism. “Fools admire” because admiration asks only for surrender: you can gush over a dazzling surface, a fashionable opinion, a charismatic scoundrel, and feel enlarged by association. It’s the currency of crowds and courtiers, a reflex that flatters the admirer more than it honors the admired. Pope, writing in a culture of patronage, salons, and reputations built on display, knows how quickly taste becomes theater.

“Men of sense approve” is the corrective - and the sting. Approval implies judgment: weighing evidence, noticing craft, testing character. It’s an act with consequences because it commits you. Pope isn’t praising cynicism; he’s defending discrimination in the older sense of the word, the ability to tell the real from the merely radiant. The moral subtext is sharper: admiration is susceptible to manipulation, while approval resists it. In an era when public life was thick with flattery and faction, being “of sense” meant refusing to be emotionally conscripted.

The genius is the compression. “Admire” feels expansive, even romantic; “approve” sounds bureaucratic. Pope weaponizes that tonal mismatch to argue that mature taste often feels unsexy. He also smuggles in an ethic for critics and citizens alike: don’t confuse being moved with being right. If you can be made to admire on command, you can be led on command. Approval is where freedom starts.