“We in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true.”

We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

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.

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.

The character of a man is known from his conversations.

It is a great plague to be too handsome a man.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

If any man thinks to swindle God, he is wrong.

I am a child of destiny who will unite East and West and change the world.

It’s strange how so much life can be lived without speaking