“So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.”

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.

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.