“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.”

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.

Do we not see all humans unaware Of what they want, and always searching everywhere, And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

The body searches for that which has injured the mind with love.

Pleasant it to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in peril.

Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.

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

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.

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.