Lucretius Quotes

For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.

...if one thing frightens people, it is that so much happens, on earth and out in space, the reasons for which seem somehow to escape them, and they fill in the gap by putting it down to the gods.

From the heart of this fountain of delights wells up some bitter taste to choke them even amid the flowers.

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.

It is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another.

Fear was the first thing on Earth to create gods.

All life is a struggle in the dark.

Poor humanity, to saddle the gods with such a responsibility and throw in a vindictive temper. What griefs they hatch for themselves, what festering sores for us, what tears for our prosperity! This is not piety, this oft-repeated show of bowing a veiled head before a graven image; this bustling to every altar; this kow-towing and prostration on the ground with palms outspread before the shrines of the gods; this deluging of vow on vow. True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

How many evils have flowed from religion.

Rest, brother, rest. Have you done ill or well Rest, rest, There is no God, no gods who dwell Crowned with avenging righteousness on high Nor frowning ministers of their hate in hell.

Under what law each thing was created, and how necessary it is for it to continue under this, and how it cannot annul the strong rules that govern its lifetime.

The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

Pleasant it to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in peril.

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.

Since you must admit that there is nothing outside the universe, it can have no limit and is accordingly without end or measure. It makes no odds in which part of it you may take your stand; whatever spot anyone may occupy, the universe stretches away from him just the same in all directions without limit.

Look at a man in the midst of doubt & danger and you will learn in his hour of adversity what he really is.

Religious questions have often led to wicked and impious actions.

The dreadful fear of hell is to be driven out, which disturbs the life of man and renders it miserable, overcasting all things with the blackness of darkness, and leaving no pure, unalloyed pleasure.

Were a man to order his life by the rules of true reason, a frugal substance joined to a contented mind is for him great riches; for never is there any lack of a little.

You alone govern the nature of things. Without you nothing emerges into the light of day, without you nothing is joyous or lovely.

From the midst of the very fountain of pleasure, something of bitterness arises to vex us in the flower of enjoyment.

From the heart of the fountain of delight rises a jet of bitterness that tortures us among the very flowers.

Falling drops will at last wear away stone.

The old must always make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the ruins of another. There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone.

Too often in time past, religion has brought forth criminal and shameful actions... How many evils has religion caused?

Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

So much wrong could religion induce.

Nothing comes from nothing.

So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.

Yet a little while, and (the happy hour) will be over, nor ever more shall we be able to recall it.

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

The water hollows out the stone, not by force but drop by drop.

(On the temperature of water in wells) The reason why the water in wells becomes colder in summer is that the earth is then rarefied by the heat, and releases into the air all the heat-particles it happens to have. So, the more the earth is drained of heat, the colder becomes the moisture that is concealed in the ground. On the other hand, when all the earth condenses and contracts and congeals with the cold, then, of course, as it contracts, it squeezes out into the wells whatever heat it holds.

Air, I should explain, becomes wind when it is agitated.

Nothing can be created out of nothing.

There is nothing that exists so great or marvelous that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.

The first-beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.

To ask for power is forcing uphill a stone which after all rolls back again from the summit and seeks in headlong haste the levels of the plain.

Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!

Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.

Certainly it was no design of the atoms to place themselves in a particular order, nor did they decide what motions each should have. But atoms were struck with blows in many ways and carried along by their own weight from infinite times up to the present. They have been accustomed to move and to meet in all manner of ways. For this reason, it came to pass that being spread abroad through a vast time and trying every sort of combination and motion, at length those come together that produce great things, like earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.