Quotes About Lucretius

Lucretius said, 'fear begets gods,' and he was right.

including the partial copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear—a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.

Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls it the "Lucretius Problem." Named

Today the doctrine of metaphysical free will appears to us as one of those archaic relics of traditional religion that Epicurus and Lucretius should have done their utmost to combat. Moral freedom and determinism are by no means incompatible. Man is himself a causal agent in nature and is morally responsible when he acts "freely," i.e., from his own settled character and in his own capacity as an individual, provided he is exempt from external force or pressure.

Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden "swerve." As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination

Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.

Writing to Lucretius, on Epicurus' belief that the soul was no different from the rest of the cosmos; made of atoms] Death is therefore nothing to us, and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea, and sea with heaven.

I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,               atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,               atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari. (on Lucretius)

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

Of all the material objects we know, quasars are closest to lucretius's javelin. Quasars are galaxies in early stage of evolution. The light that tells us about them today has traveled for billions of years. They move away from us at a speed close to that of light; in that way they mirror the expansion of the universe.

Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it's made of invisible particles. He

Material objects are of two kinds, atoms and compounds of atoms. The atoms themselves cannot be swamped by any force, for they are preserved indefinitely by their absolute solidity.

The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he fared forth far beyond the flaming ramparts of the heavens and traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.

If the matter of death is reduced to sleep and rest, what can there be so bitter in it, that any one should pine in eternal grief for the decease of a friend?

All things around, convulsed with violent thunder, seem to tremble, and the mighty walls of the capacious world appear at once to have started and burst asunder.

Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn't invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius.

Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn't invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius. It wasn't and isn't a new, modern discovery. It is simply one part of one ancient worldview.