Lucretius Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

Nature allows
Destruction nor collapse of aught, until
Some outward force may shatter by a blow,
Or inward craft, entering its hollow cells,
Dissolve it down.

Lucretius
For common instinct of our race declares
That body of itself exists: unless
This primal faith, deep-founded, fail us not,
Naught will there be whereunto to appeal
On things occult when seeking aught to prove
By reasonings of mind.

Lucretius
Now come: that thou mayst able be to know
That minds and the light souls of all that live
Have mortal birth and death, I will go on
Verses to build meet for thy rule of life,
Sought after long, discovered with sweet toil.

Lucretius
When bodies spring apart, because the air
Somehow condenses, wander they from truth:
For then a void is formed, where none before;
And, too, a void is filled which was before.

Lucretius
Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

Lucretius
The sum of things there is no power can change,
For naught exists outside, to which can flee
Out of the world matter of any kind,
Nor forth from which a fresh supply can spring,
Break in upon the founded world, and change
Whole nature of things, and turn their motions about.

Lucretius
All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists
Of twain of things: of bodies and of void
In which they're set, and where they're moved around.

Lucretius
All things around, convulsed with violent thunder, seem to tremble, and the mighty walls of the capacious world appear at once to have started and burst asunder.

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
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
Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.

Lucretius
Confess then, naught from nothing can become,
Since all must have their seeds, wherefrom to grow,
Wherefrom to reach the gentle fields of air.

Lucretius
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.

Lucretius
Perhaps too the sun as he shines aloft with rosy lamp has roundabout him much fire with heats that are not visible, and thus the fire may be marked by no radiance, so that fraught with heat it increases to such a degree the stroke of the rays.

Lucretius
Bodies, again,
Are partly primal germs of things, and partly
Unions deriving from the primal germs.

Lucretius
For whenever bodies fall through water and thin air, they must quicken their descents in proportion to their weights, because the body of water and subtle nature of air cannot retard everything in equal degree, but more readily give way [when] overpowered by the heavier.

Lucretius
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still
Nothing can be create, we shall divine
More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are,
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.

Lucretius
But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked
About by body: there's in things a void-
Which to have known will serve thee many a turn,
Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt,
Forever searching in the sum of all,
And losing faith in these pronouncements mine.

Lucretius