Titus Lucretius Quotes & Sayings

Though you outlive as many generations as you will,
Nevertheless, Eternal Death is waiting for you still.
It is no shorter, that eternity that lies in store
For the man who with the setting sun today will rise no more,
Than for the man whose sun has set months, even years, before. — Titus Lucretius Carus

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

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

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

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

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

It must not be supposed that atoms of every sort can be linked in every variety of combination. If that were so, you would see monsters coming into being everywhere. Hybrid growths of man and beast would arise. Lofty branches would spread here and there from a living body. Limbs of land-beast and sea-beast would often be conjoined. Chimeras breathing flame from hideous jaws would be reared by nature throughout the all-generating earth. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order - if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect - what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth? — Titus Lucretius Carus

There can be no centre
in infinity. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death. — Titus Lucretius Carus

And so, through the blank of void, all things must fall at equal speed, though not of equal weight. — Titus Lucretius Carus

He does not see that all things slowly weaken and fall to ruin,2 worn out by ages past. — Titus Lucretius Carus

The supply of matter in the universe was never more tightly packed than it is now, or more widely spread out. For nothing is ever added to it or subtracted from it. It follows that the movement of atoms today is no different from what it was in bygone ages and always will be. So the things that have regularly come into being will continue to come into being in the same manner; they will be and grow and flourish so far as each is allowed by the laws of nature. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Such heinous acts could superstition prompt.12 — Titus Lucretius Carus

hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
(1.146ff.)

Therefore it is necessary that neither the rays of the sun nor the shining spears of Day should shatter this terror and darkness of the mind, but the aspect and reason of nature... — Titus Lucretius Carus

If within wood hide flame and smoke and ash then wood consists of things unlike itself. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Mortal, what hast thou of such grave concern
That thou indulgest in too sickly plaints?
Why this bemoaning and beweeping death?
For if thy life aforetime and behind
To thee was grateful, and not all thy good
Was heaped as in sieve to flow away
And perish unavailingly, why not,
Even like a banqueter, depart the hall,
Laden with life? — Titus Lucretius Carus

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

Epicureanism was a philosophy that brought peace and quiet rather than inspiration and exhilaration; based on a theory of the exclusive validity of sense perception and on an ethical doctrine that pleasure was the criterion of the good, it lent itself not only to a dull and flat dialectic but also to gross misinterpretation. Although, — Titus Lucretius Carus

There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone ... Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal... — Titus Lucretius Carus

Trees don't live in the sky, and clouds don't swim
In the salt seas, and fish don't leap in wheatfields,
Blood isn't found in wood, nor sap in rocks.
By fixed arrangement, all that live and grows
Submits to limit and restrictions. — Titus Lucretius Carus

...nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. O minds of mortals, blighted by your blindness! Amid what deep darkness and daunting dangers life's little day is passed! To think that you should fail to see that nature importantly demands only that the body may be rid of pain, and that the mind, divorced from anxiety and fear, may enjoy a feeling of contentment! — Titus Lucretius Carus

Life is one long struggle in the dark. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Rather, there must be seeds, unseen, combined 895 in many ways and common to many things. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Humanity, at any rate, does have free will, and in a most ingenious way Epicurus derived free will from the doctrine of the swerve of the atom, saying in effect that the power to make a deliberate choice of action was inherent in the atom itself, which demonstrated that power by unaccountably swerving from its "normal" path. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Your life is death already, though you live
And though you see, except that half your time
You waste in sleep, and the other half you snore
With eyes wide open, forever seeing dreams,
Forever in panic, forever lacking wit
To find out what the trouble is, depressed,
Or drunk, or drifting aimlessly around. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Here there is left a tenuous subterfuge, 875 which Anaxagoras seizes: think of things as mixtures of everything, all concealed but one that shows - the one that's mixed in largest measure and close to the surface and placed right at the top. — Titus Lucretius Carus

For whatever changes and leaves its natural bounds
is instant death of that which was before. — Titus Lucretius Carus

For though I were ignorant of the basic stuff, still, just from heaven's behavior, I would dare affirm, and assert on many other grounds, that gods most certainly never made the world 180 for you and me: it stands too full of flaws. — Titus Lucretius Carus

For as in the dead of night children are prey
to hosts of terrors, so we sometimes by day
are fearful of things that should no more concern us
than bogeys that frighten children in the dark.
This fright, this night of the mind must be dispelled
not by the rays of the sun, nor day's bright spears,
but by the face of nature and her laws. — Titus Lucretius Carus

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

Continual dropping wears away a stone. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Truths kindle light for truths. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death? — Titus Lucretius Carus

Man's greatest wealth is to live on a little with contented mind; for little is never lacking. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Constant dripping hollows out a stone. — Titus Lucretius Carus

If the world is the product of nothing but natural forces and natural law, divine intervention is impossible. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Matter's basic elements are solid,
Completely so, and that they fly through time
Invincible, indestructible for ever. — Titus Lucretius Carus

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

A man leaves his great house because he's bored
With life at home, and suddenly returns,
Finding himself no happier abroad.
He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,
You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,
And yawns before he's put his foot inside,
Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,
Or even rushes back to town again.
So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because
It clings to him the more closely against his will)
And hates himself because he is sick in mind
And does not know the cause of his disease. — Titus Lucretius Carus

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

So far as it goes, a small thing may give analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.) — Titus Lucretius Carus

Words pass through walls and slip past lock and key,
and numbing cold seeps to our very bones. — Titus Lucretius Carus

In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to "encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago." This wish for a return to the era of philosophy would put Jefferson in the same period as Titus Lucretius Carus, thanks to whose six-volume poem De Rerum Naturum (On the Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These men concluded that the world was composed of atoms in perpetual motion, and Epicurus, in particular, went on to argue that the gods, if they existed, played no part in human affairs. It followed that events like thunderstorms were natural and not supernatural, that ceremonies of worship and propitiation were a waste of time, and that there was nothing to be feared in death. — Christopher Hitchens