“How many evils have flowed from religion.”

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

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

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

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

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

Fear is the mother of all gods … Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods.

The dreadful fear of hell is to be driven out, which disturbs the life of man and renders it miserable, overcasting all things with the blackness of darkness, and leaving no pure, unalloyed pleasure.

Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

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

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.

These the senses we trust, first, last, and always.

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

Violence and wrong enclose all who commit them in their meshes and do mostly recoil on him from whom they begin.

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

It is doubtful what fortune to-morrow will bring.

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

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

The mind is like a river. The thoughts are like the various droplets of water. We are submerged in that water. Stay on the bank and watch your mind.

Love shouldn’t be as fickle as the rain. But an ever flowing torrent.

It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.