“Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.”

Those vestiges of natures left behind Which reason cannot quite expel from us Are still so slight that naught prevents a man From living a life even worthy of the gods.

Nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another’s death.

Things stand apart so far and differ, that What’s food for one is poison for another.

How many evils have flowed from religion.

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.

The Moon and Pleiades have set, Midnight is nigh, The time is passing, passing, yet Alone I lie.

You’ll always be expected to know Chinese, and if you don’t, I’m afraid they will not respect you as much.

If this country [America] is to survive, the best-fed-nation myth had better be recognized for what it is

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness.

Trying to beat my personal best

I would not think to touch the sky with two arms

The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times.