Top 100 Lucretius Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.”

— Lucretius

52. “It’s easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

54. “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.”

— Lucretius

55. “Why dost thou not retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care?”

— Lucretius

56. “Air, I should explain, becomes wind when it is agitated.”

— Lucretius

57. “What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

59. “Truths kindle light for truths.”

— Lucretius

60. “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?”

— Lucretius

61. “For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostratebefore the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beastsbut rather in being able to look upon all things with a mind at peace.”

— Lucretius

62. “Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections.”

— Lucretius

63. “And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.”

— Lucretius

64. “By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.”

— Lucretius

65. “Sweet it is, when on the high seas the winds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the land on another’s struggles.”

— Lucretius

66. “It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.”

— Lucretius

67. “Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

69. “Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.”

— Lucretius

70. “The mind like a sick body can be healed and changed by medicine.”

— Lucretius

71. “Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.”

— Lucretius

72. “How many evils have flowed from religion.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

74. “Beauty and strength were, both of them, much esteemed; Then wealth was discovered and soon after gold Which quickly became more honoured than strength or beauty. For men, however strong or beautiful, Generally follow the train of a richer man.”

— Lucretius

75. “Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.”

— Lucretius

76. “All things obey fixed laws.”

— Lucretius

77. “One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.”

— Lucretius

78. “Certainly it was no design of the atoms to place themselves in a particular order, nor did they decide what motions each should have. But atoms were struck with blows in many ways and carried along by their own weight from infinite times up to the present.”

— Lucretius

79. “It is a pleasure for to sit at ease Upon the land, and safely for to see How other folks are tossed on the seas That with the blustering winds turmoiled be.”

— Lucretius

80. “The sum total of all sums total is eternal.”

— Lucretius

81. “Only religion can lead to such evil.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

83. “Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

— Lucretius

84. “And part of the soil is called to wash away In storms and streams shave close and gnaw the rocks. Besides, whatever the earth feeds and grows Is restored to earth. And since she surely is The womb of all things and their common grave, Earth must dwindle, you see and take on growth again.”

— Lucretius

85. “Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared.”

— Lucretius

86. “Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.”

— Lucretius

87. “Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.”

— Lucretius

88. “Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity – brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre.”

— Lucretius

89. “Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.”

— Lucretius

90. “If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets.”

— Lucretius

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

— Lucretius

92. “Religious questions have often led to wicked and impious actions.”

— Lucretius

93. “Violence and wrong enclose all who commit them in their meshes and do mostly recoil on him from whom they begin.”

— Lucretius

94. “Such crimes has superstition caused.”

— Lucretius

95. “If anyone decided to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and to misapply the name of Bacchus rather than to give liquor its right name, so be it; and let him dub the round world “Mother of the Gods” so long as he is careful not really to infest his mind with base superstitions.”

— Lucretius

96. “We plainly perceive that the mind strengthens and decays with the body.”

— Lucretius

97. “Victory puts us on a level with heaven.”

— Lucretius

98. “So much wrong could religion induce.”

— Lucretius

99. “To ask for power is forcing uphill a stone which after all rolls back again from the summit and seeks in headlong haste the levels of the plain.”

— Lucretius

100. “We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.”

— Lucretius