Lucretius Quotes - Page 4

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.

O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.

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

For it is unknown what is the real nature of the soul, whether it be born with the bodily frame or be infused at the moment of birth, whether it perishes along with us, when death separates the soul and body, or whether it visits the shades of Pluto and bottomless pits, or enters by divine appointment into other animals.

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

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

Why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?

It is doubtful what fortune to-morrow will bring. [Lat., Posteraque in dubio est fortunam quam vehat aetas.]

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings. [Lat., O miseras hominum menteis! oh, pectora caeca!]

Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Mother of Aeneas, pleasure of men and gods. -Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas

Fear is the mother of all gods.

How many evils have flowed from religion.

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?

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

Violence and wrong enclose all who commit them in their meshes and do mostly recoil on him from whom they begin.

Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.

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

For men know not what the nature of the soul is; whether it is engendered with us, or whether, on the contrary, it is infused into us at our birth, whether it perishes with us, dissolved by death, or whether it haunts the gloomy shades and vast pools of Orcus.

Fear in sooth holds so in check all mortals, becasue thay see many operations go on in earth and heaven, the causes of which they can in no way understand, believing them therefore to be done by power divine. for these reasons when we shall have seen that nothing can be produced from nothing, we shall then more correctly ascertain that which we are seeking, both the elements out of which every thing can be produced and the manner in which every thing can be produced in which all things are done without the hands of the gods.

If atom stocks are inexhaustible, Greater than power of living things to count, If Nature's same creative power were present too To throw the atoms into unions - exactly as united now, Why then confess you must That other worlds exist in other regions of the sky, And different tribes of men, kinds of wild beasts.

Nay, the greatest wits and poets, too, cease to live; Homer, their prince, sleeps now in the same forgotten sleep as do the others. [Lat., Adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum; Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus Sceptra potitus, eadem aliis sopitu quiete est.]