Hope springs eternal in the human breast: man never is…

The couplet comes in the first epistle of An Essay on Man, where Pope argues that Heaven wisely hides the future from its creatures. The lamb doomed to die today, he writes, would not skip and play if it had our reason: it licks the very hand raised to shed its blood. Such “blindness to the future” is a kindness. So, “Hope humbly then”: God does not let us know our future bliss, but gives us hope as a blessing now. The couplet follows, and the soul, “uneasy, and confined from home”, rests in “a life to come”.

Pope published the Essay, a long philosophical poem in rhyming couplets, in 1733 and 1734, at first anonymously. It set out to “vindicate the ways of God to man”, and gave English other famous lines, such as “Whatever is, is right”.

The first line has become a proverb, often used with a smile about hopes that return against the odds. The second is sadder: we are never happy, only about to be.

An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work