Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Caruswas a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things...
NationalityRoman
ProfessionPoet
life fate vain
Our life must once have end; in vain we fly From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.
sweet flower earth
For thee the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers.
fire rocks water
A property is that which not at all Can be disjoined and severed from a thing Without a fatal dissolution: such, Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow To the wide waters, touch to corporal things, Intangibility to the viewless void.
names goes-on body
And thus thou canst remark that every act At bottom exists not of itself, nor is As body is, nor has like name with void; But rather of sort more fitly to be called An accident of body, and of place Wherein all things go on.
unions germs body
Bodies, again, Are partly primal germs of things, and partly Unions deriving from the primal germs.
space profound goes-on
But since I've taught that bodies of matter, made Completely solid, hither and thither fly Forevermore unconquered through all time, Now come, and whether to the sum of them There be a limit or be none, for thee Let us unfold; likewise what has been found To be the wide inane, or room, or space Wherein all things soever do go on, Let us examine if it finite be All and entire, or reach unmeasured round And downward an illimitable profound.
evil religion
How many evils has religion caused! [Lat., Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!]
hands space giving
Thus the sum Forever is replenished, and we live As mortals by eternal give and take. The nations wax, the nations wane away; In a brief space the generations pass, And like to runners hand the lamp of life One unto other.
spring world matter
The sum of things there is no power can change, For naught exists outside, to which can flee Out of the world matter of any kind, Nor forth from which a fresh supply can spring, Break in upon the founded world, and change Whole nature of things, and turn their motions about.
giving forever growth
Nor can those motions that bring death prevail Forever, nor eternally entomb The welfare of the world; nor, further, can Those motions that give birth to things and growth Keep them forever when created there.
men reason worthy
Those vestiges of natures left behind Which reason cannot quite expel from us Are still so slight that naught prevents a man From living a life even worthy of the gods.
sweet light long
Now come: that thou mayst able be to know That minds and the light souls of all that live Have mortal birth and death, I will go on Verses to build meet for thy rule of life, Sought after long, discovered with sweet toil.
blow mind dungeons
Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.
aids born one-thing
[N]ature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.