“We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from.”

How is it that the sky feeds the stars?

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

How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings.

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

The old must always make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the ruins of another. There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone.

The sum total of all sums total is eternal.

Only religion can lead to such evil.

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

Epicurus whose genius surpassed all humankind, extinguished the light of others, as the stars are dimmed by the rising sun.

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

Fear was the first thing on Earth to create gods.

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.

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.

A falling drop at last will carve a stone.

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.

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

I want you to bury your sorrows in the depths of my embrace.

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

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.

God is not interested in our spiritual life. He’s interested in our life.

Even success softens not the heart of the envious.

I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.

For nobody is curious, who isn’t malevolent.

And once he’s clear about that reality, he gathers the strength to begin to cope.