Lucretius Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Lucretius
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?

Lucretius
When the whole earth rocks under their feet and towns tumble with the shock or doubtfully threaten to fall, what wonder that mortal men abase themselves and make over to the gods in things here on earth high prerogatives and marvelous powers, sufficient to govern all things?

Lucretius
And thus thou canst remark that every act
At bottom exists not of itself, nor is
As body is, nor has like name with void;
But rather of sort more fitly to be called
An accident of body, and of place
Wherein all things go on.

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

Lucretius
We must well grasp the principle of things above, the principle by which the courses of the sun and moon go on, the force by which every thing on earth proceeds.

Lucretius
I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,
And the primordial germs of things unfold,
Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies
And fosters all, and whither she resolves
Each in the end when each is overthrown.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.

Lucretius
Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stills The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills - Thrills through the conscience with the news of peace - How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!

Lucretius
Nor can those motions that bring death prevail
Forever, nor eternally entomb
The welfare of the world; nor, further, can
Those motions that give birth to things and growth
Keep them forever when created there.

Lucretius
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.

Lucretius
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.

Lucretius
A property is that which not at all
Can be disjoined and severed from a thing
Without a fatal dissolution: such,
Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow
To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,
Intangibility to the viewless void.

Lucretius
Thus, then, the All that is is limited
In no one region of its onward paths,
For then 'tmust have forever its beyond.

Lucretius
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and the suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

Lucretius
Again, see you not that even stones are conquered by time, that high towers fall and rocks moulder away, that shrines and idols of gods are worn out with decay, and that the holy divinity cannot prolong the bounds of fate or struggle against the fixed laws of nature? In Great Books of the Western World (Volume 12)

Lucretius
This terror then and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspects and the law of nature; the warp of whose design we shall begin with this first principle, nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.

Lucretius
You may complete as many generations as you please during your life; none the less will that everlasting death await you.

Lucretius
But centaurs never existed; there could never be So to speak a double nature in a single body Or a double body composed of incongruous parts With a consequent disparity in the faculties. The stupidest person ought to be convinced of that.

Lucretius
Give your mind now to the true reasoning I have to unfold. A new fact is battling strenuously for access to your ears. A new aspect of the Universe is striving to reveal itself. But no fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation.

Lucretius
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers.

Lucretius
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.

Lucretius
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.

Lucretius
Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.

Lucretius
First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

Lucretius
Lack of power to solve the question troubles the mind with doubts, whether there was ever a birth-time of the world, and whether likewise there is to be any end...

Lucretius
Thus the sum
Forever is replenished, and we live
As mortals by eternal give and take.
The nations wax, the nations wane away;
In a brief space the generations pass,
And like to runners hand the lamp of life
One unto other.

Lucretius
For out of doubt
In these affairs 'tis each man's will itself
That gives the start, and hence throughout our limbs
Incipient motions are diffused.

Lucretius
And so some day, The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe Ringed round with hostile force, Will yield and face decay and come crumbling to ruin.

Lucretius