Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation; not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.
Violence and wrong enclose all who commit them in their meshes and do mostly recoil on him from whom they begin.
Fear is the mother of all gods.
How is it that the sky feeds the stars?
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.
Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!
One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.
Such evil deeds could religion prompt.
Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
Truths kindle light for truths.
The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied.
Time changes the nature of the whole world; Everything passes from one state to another And nothing stays like itself.
Nature obliges everything to change about. One thing crumbles and falls in the weakness of age; Another grows in its place from a negligible start. So time alters the whole nature of the world And earth passes from one state to another.
But centaurs never existed; there could never be So to speak a double nature in a single body Or a double body composed of incongruous parts With a consequent disparity in the faculties. The stupidest person ought to be convinced of that.
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.
Human life lay foul before men’s eyes, crushed to the dust beneath religion’s weight.
True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.
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.