Lucretius Quotes

Never trust the calm sea when she shows her false alluring smile.

The sum total of all sums total is eternal (meaning the universe). [Lat., Summarum summa est aeternum.]

Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

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

... we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true.

It is a pleasure for to sit at ease Upon the land, and safely for to see How other folks are tossed on the seas That with the blustering winds turmoiled be.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

How is it that the sky feeds the stars?

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

Sweet it is, when on the high seas the winds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the land on another's struggles.

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

The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt.

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.

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.

All things keep on in everlasting motion, Out of the infinite come the particles, Speeding above, below, in endless dance.

Tears for the mourners who are left behind Peace everlasting for the quiet dead.

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

Death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.

If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?

Men conceal the past scenes of their lives.

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.

One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.

Out beyond our world there are, elsewhere, other assemblages of matter making other worlds. Ours is not the only one in air's embrace.

Time changes the nature of the whole world; Everything passes from one state to another And nothing stays like itself.

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

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

Human life lay foul before men's eyes, crushed to the dust beneath religion's weight.

Not they who reject the gods are profane, but those who accept them.

We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.

There is no place in nature for extinction.

Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.

What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth.

Epicurus ... whose genius surpassed all humankind, extinguished the light of others, as the stars are dimmed by the rising sun.

The mask is torn off, while the reality remains

Do we not see all humans unaware Of what they want, and always searching everywhere, And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?

One Man's food is another Man's Poison

How many evils have flowed from religion.

The mind like a sick body can be healed and changed by medicine.

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

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.

The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great are the faults that mar it.

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

Those vestiges of natures left behind Which reason cannot quite expel from us Are still so slight that naught prevents a man From living a life even worthy of the gods.

A falling drop at last will carve a stone.

Such crimes has superstition caused.

...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.

These [the senses] we trust, first, last, and always.

All life is a struggle in the dark.

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.

[N]ature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.