Alexander Pope: Making

“I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.”

Alexander Pope

Preface.
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717)
Context: I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.

“To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage.”

Alexander Pope

Source: Prologue to Mr. Addison's Cato (1713), Line 1.

Art , Soul , Heart

“Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long Absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: Absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.”

Alexander Pope

Letter, written in collaboration with Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, to Jonathan Swift, December 14, 1725.

Men , Affliction

“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.”

Alexander Pope

Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

People , Soul

“Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.”

Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock

Canto III, line 117.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)

Coffee

“When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.”

Alexander Pope

Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

Men , God , Age

“Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy.”

Alexander Pope

Martinus Scriblerus on the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Chap. xi, reported in William Warburton, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq (1751) p. 196.

God , Lovers , Time , Happiness

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

Alexander Pope

Statement of 1739, as quoted in Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence, p. 286.
Variant reported in Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men (1887) by Samuel Arthur Bent, p. 451: "True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can."
Attributed