Top 100 Quotes About Lucretius
#1. The key point, as Epicurus' disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.
Stephen Greenblatt
#2. For envy, like lightning, generally strikes at the top Or any point which sticks out from the ordinary level. LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura Our envy always outlives the felicity of its object.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#3. I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius
By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery.
Robert Frost
#5. Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.
Lucretius
#6. In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"
Alain De Botton
#7. as Lucretius wrote: "our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable
Carlo Rovelli
#8. Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
Sigmund Freud
#9. Harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good.
Arthur C. Clarke
#10. 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
#11. Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.
Stephen Greenblatt
#12. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.
William Styron
#13. Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
#14. Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it's made of invisible particles. He
Italo Calvino
#15. So-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time. I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed.
Anonymous
#16. To paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are.
T.K. Naliaka
#17. Lucretius poetic, or "everything is infinite randomness, life is awesome, let's get drunk and fuck." I don't need a reason to live, I just need access to booze and sex, and that's motivating enough. However,
Peter Welch
#18. One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.
D.H. Lawrence
#19. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things. LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura1
Carlo Rovelli
#20. There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
Andrew Solomon
#21. Lucretius' maxim: 'Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.
Irvin D. Yalom
#22. 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
#23. If within wood hide flame and smoke and ash then wood consists of things unlike itself.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#24. Such evil deeds could religion prompt.
Lucretius
#25. The atoms in it must be used over and over again; thus the death of one thing becomes necessary for the birth of another.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#26. O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.
Lucretius
#27. The sum total of all sums total is eternal (meaning the universe).
[Lat., Summarum summa est aeternum.]
Lucretius
#28. A falling drop at last will carve a stone.
Lucretius
#29. You alone govern the nature of things. Without you nothing emerges into the light of day, without you nothing is joyous or lovely.
Lucretius
#30. [N]ature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.
Lucretius
#31. 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
#32. To begin, this thing he calls "homoeomeria" - take bones: you see, they're made of little bones, 835 wee, tiny ones; and from wee, tiny guts, guts are created; and blood comes into being when lots of little drops of blood foregather.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#33. It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.
Lucretius
#34. Death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.
Lucretius
#35. Gently touching with the charm of poetry.
Lucretius
#36. Bodies, again,
Are partly primal germs of things, and partly
Unions deriving from the primal germs.
Lucretius
#37. Air, I should explain, becomes wind when it is agitated.
Lucretius
#38. Clearly, this never happens, since each thing sprung of its own specific seed and parent, grows always true to type, as we observe. The process, of course, must follow clear-cut laws.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#39. All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Lucretius
#40. If the world is the product of nothing but natural forces and natural law, divine intervention is impossible.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#41. Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.
Lucretius
#42. 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
#43. No matter how difficult a task may look.. Persistence and steady action will get you through
Lucretius
#44. 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
#45. Our life must once have end; in vain we fly
From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.
Lucretius
#46. Time changes the nature of the whole world; Everything passes from one state to another And nothing stays like itself.
Lucretius
#47. 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
#48. There is nothing that exists so great or marvelous that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.
Lucretius
#49. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)
Titus Lucretius Carus
#50. 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
#51. Falling drops will at last wear away stone.
Lucretius
#52. this terror then and drakness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature; the warp whose design we shall begin with this first principle, nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#53. 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
#54. The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.
Lucretius
#55. Things stand apart so far and differ, that What's food for one is poison for another.
Lucretius
#56. The mask is torn off, while the reality remains
Lucretius
#57. Man's greatest wealth is to live on a little with contented mind; for little is never lacking.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#58. So much wrong could religion induce.
Lucretius
#59. Matter's basic elements are solid,
Completely so, and that they fly through time
Invincible, indestructible for ever.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#60. Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.
Lucretius
#61. 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
#62. Watch a man in times of adversity to discover what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#63. In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.
Lucretius
#64. To fear death, then, is foolish, since death is the final and complete annihilation of personal identity, the ultimate release from anxiety and pain.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Tears for the mourners who are left behind
Peace everlasting for the quiet dead.
Lucretius
#71. And in declaring true every theory that does not contravene the evidence of the senses, Epicurus does not blink the fact that the philosopher may arrive at more than one explanation for a given phenomenon - in some cases, even at explanations that are mutually exclusive or contradictory.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.
Lucretius
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Lucretius
#83. There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.
Stephan Greenblatt
#84. Men conceal the past scenes of their lives.
Lucretius
#85. It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.
Lucretius
#86. Victory puts us on a level with heaven.
Lucretius
#87. Thus it comes
That earth, without her seasons of fixed rains,
Could bear no produce such as makes us glad,
And whatsoever lives, if shut from food,
Prolongs its kind and guards its life no more.
Lucretius
#88. The first beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.
Lucretius
#90. There is so much wrong with the world. (tanta stat praedita culpa)
Lucretius
#91. Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.
Lucretius
#92. Words pass through walls and slip past lock and key,
and numbing cold seeps to our very bones.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#93. Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#94. Never trust the calm sea when she shows her false alluring smile.
Lucretius
#95. Fear is the mother of all gods.
Lucretius
#96. One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.
Lucretius
#97. 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
#98. The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he fared forth far beyond the flaming ramparts of the heavens and traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#99. How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings.
[Lat., O miseras hominum menteis! oh, pectora caeca!]
Lucretius
#100. He does not see that all things slowly weaken and fall to ruin,2 worn out by ages past.
Titus Lucretius Carus
