Lucretius Quotes

#1. 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

#2. O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#6. It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#8. Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

Lucretius

#9. All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.

Lucretius

#10. 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.

Lucretius

#11. Full from the fount of Joy's delicious springs
Some bitter o'er the flowers its bubbling venom springs.
[Lat., Medio de fonte leporum
Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat.]

Lucretius

#12. Our life must once have end; in vain we fly
From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.

Lucretius

#13. Deprived of pain, and also deprived of danger, able to do what it wants, [Nature] does not need us, nor understands our deserts, and it cannot be angry.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#15. 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

#16. Falling drops will at last wear away stone.

Lucretius

#17. 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

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

Lucretius

#19. The mask is torn off, while the reality remains

Lucretius

#20. So much wrong could religion induce.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#22. Time by itself does not exist; but from things themselves there results a sense of what has already taken place, what is now going on and what is to ensue. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#24. Beauty and strength were, both of them, much esteemed; Then wealth was discovered and soon after gold Which quickly became more honoured than strength or beauty. For men, however strong or beautiful, Generally follow the train of a richer man.

Lucretius

#25. 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.

Lucretius

#26. 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

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

Lucretius

#28. Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.

Lucretius

#29. 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

#30. 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.

Lucretius

#31. 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.

Lucretius

#32. Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.

Lucretius

#33. 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!

Lucretius

#34. When the body is assailed by the strong force of time and the limbs weaken from exhausted force, genius breaks down, and mind and speech fail.
[Lat., Ubi jam valideis quassatum est viribus aevi
Corpus, et obtuseis ceciderunt viribus artus,
Claudicat ingenium delirat linguaque mensque.]

Lucretius

#35. 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 you are free of them yourself is pleasant.

Lucretius

#36. It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.

Lucretius

#37. Victory puts us on a level with heaven.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#39. Fear is the mother of all gods.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#41. Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#43. Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity - brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#46. In a brief space the generations of beings are changed, and, like runners, pass on the torches of life.

Lucretius

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#51. The body searches for that which has injured the mind with love.

Lucretius

#52. If anyone decided to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and to misapply the name of Bacchus rather than to give liquor its right name, so be it; and let him dub the round world "Mother of the Gods" so long as he is careful not really to infest his mind with base superstitions.

Lucretius

#53. It is great wealth to a soul to live frugally with a contented mind.

Lucretius

#54. The fall of dropping water wears away the Stone.

Lucretius

#55. 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

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

Lucretius

#57. How many evils have flowed from religion.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#59. All life is a struggle in the dark.

Lucretius

#60. Fear was the first thing on Earth to create gods.

Lucretius

#61. And part of the soil is called to wash away In storms and streams shave close and gnaw the rocks. Besides, whatever the earth feeds and grows Is restored to earth. And since she surely is The womb of all things and their common grave, Earth must dwindle, you see and take on growth again.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#63. If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets.

Lucretius

#64. 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

#65. Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.

Lucretius

#66. So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.

Lucretius

#67. Religious questions have often led to wicked and impious actions.

Lucretius

#68. 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.]

Lucretius

#69. The sum of all sums is eternity.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#75. It is pleasant, when the sea runs high, to view from land the great distress of another.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#77. 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

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

Lucretius

#79. Tis pleasant to stand on shore and watch others labouring in a stormy sea.

Lucretius

#80. The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.

Lucretius

#81. And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.

Lucretius

#82. 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

#83. We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.

Lucretius

#84. 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

#85. 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.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#90. If God can do anything he can make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it. Then there is something God cannot do, he cannot lift the stone. Therefore God does not exist.

Lucretius

#91. No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation. Equally, there is nothing so mighty or so marvelous that the wonder it evokes does not tend to diminish in time.

Lucretius

#92. 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.

Lucretius

#93. 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

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

Lucretius

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others

Lucretius

#98. For there is a VOID in things; a truth which it will be useful for you, in reference to many points, to know; and which will prevent you from wandering in doubt.

Lucretius

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

Lucretius

#100. 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?

Lucretius