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

Mother of Aeneas, pleasure of men and gods.

Our life must once have end; in vain we fly From following Fate; e’en now, e’en now, we die.

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.

Bliss is a thing which is always there and is not something which comes and goes. That which comes and goes is a creation of the mind.

The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own capacity.

To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.

Concentration of the mind is in a way common to both Knowledge and Yoga. Yoga aims at union of the individual with the universal, the Reality. This Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist.

The Sage has no thinking mind and therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.

Who is in control, the mind or the soul; is it the changing thoughts the presence despite what rises and falls.

For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.

That which offends the ear will not easily gain admission to the mind.