Lucretius
The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt.Collection: Envy
Certainly it was no design of the atoms to place themselves in a particular order, nor did they decide what motions each should have. But atoms were struck with blows in many ways and carried along by their own weight from infinite times up to the present.Collection: Blow
Falling drops will at last wear away stone.Collection: Fall
Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.Collection: Men
How is it that the sky feeds the stars?Collection: Stars
To ask for power is forcing uphill a stone which after all rolls back again from the summit and seeks in headlong haste the levels of the plain.Collection: Power
... 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.Collection: Pain
Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Time
It is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another.Collection: Struggle
From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.Collection: Flower
It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.Collection: Wind
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.Collection: Doubt
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.Collection: Science
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.Collection: Duration
For thee the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers.Collection: Sweet
Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.Collection: Passion
Tempests, and bright lightnings, are to be sung; their nature is to be told, and from what cause they pursue their course; lest, having foolishly divided the heaven into parts, you should be anxious as to the quarter from which the flying flame may come, or to what region it may betake itself; and tremble to think how it penetrates through walled enclosures, and how, having exercised its power, it extricates itself from them. Of which phenomena the multitude can by no means see the causes, and think that they are accomplished by supernatural power.Collection: Mean
Things stand apart so far and differ, that What's food for one is poison for another.Collection: Food
From the midst of the very fountain of pleasure, something of bitterness arises to vex us in the flower of enjoyment.Collection: Flower
When the supreme violence of a furious wind upon the sea sweeps over the waters the chief admiral of a fleet along with his mighty legions, does he not crave the gods' peace with vows and in his panic seek with prayers the peace of the winds and favouring breezes. Nonetheless, he is caught up in the furious hurricane and driven upon the shoals of death.Collection: Prayer
The gods and their tranquil abodes appear, which no winds disturb, nor clouds bedew with showers, nor does the white snow, hardened by frost, annoy them; the heaven, always pure, is without clouds, and smiles with pleasant light diffused.Collection: Clouds
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.Collection: Mother
Sweet it is, when on the high seas the winds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the land on another's struggles.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Religious
I return to the newborn world, and the soft-soil fields, What their first birthing lifted to the shores Of light, and trusted to the wayward winds. First the Earth gave the shimmer of greenery And grasses to deck the hills; then over the meadows The flowering fields are bright with the color of springtime, And for all the trees that shoot into the air.Collection: Wind
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.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Men
The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.Collection: Newborn