Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Pope

Pope packages an entire moral philosophy into a singable quatrain: empathy as discipline, judgment as temptation, mercy as a social contract with spiritual stakes. The first verb matters most. "Teach me" treats compassion not as instinct but as training, something you practice against your default settings. In an age that prized wit, polish, and the quick humiliation of rivals, Pope is doing a quietly radical thing: asking to be reformed away from the very reflex his culture often rewarded.

The line breaks stage a progression from private perception to public behavior. "Feel another's woe" is interior; "hide the fault I see" is strategic restraint, an admission that moral clarity can become moral vanity. Pope knows the pleasure of spotting faults, especially for a poet whose craft depends on observation. So the subtext isn't naive gentleness; it's an argument that the most corrosive sin is the one that comes dressed as discernment.

The closing couplet tightens into reciprocity: mercy given becomes mercy owed. Read religiously, it's prayerful bargaining with a God who judges; read socially, it's reputational economics in a world where scandal circulates fast and forgiveness is scarce. Either way, Pope is skeptical of self-righteousness. He implies that the person most in need of lenience is the person most certain they can diagnose everyone else's failures. The wit is in the symmetry: your best insurance policy is the grace you extend when no one is forcing you.