Lucretius Quotes

O goddess, bestow on my words an immortal charm.

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

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.

Out beyond our world there are, elsewhere, other assemblages of matter making other worlds. Ours is not the only one in air’s embrace.

Human life lay foul before men’s eyes, crushed to the dust beneath religion’s weight.

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.