No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation. Equally, there is nothing so mighty or so marvelous that the wonder it evokes does not tend to diminish in time.
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still Nothing can be create, we shall divine More clearly what we seek: those elements From which alone all things created are, And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.
For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.
If atom stocks are inexhaustible, Greater than power of living things to count, If Nature's same creative power were present too To throw the atoms into unions - exactly as united now, Why then confess you must That other worlds exist in other regions of the sky, And different tribes of men, kinds of wild beasts.
What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others
One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.
Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.
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.
Continual dropping wears away a stone.
Yet a little while, and (the happy hour) will be over, nor ever more shall we be able to recall it.
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.
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.
The sum total of all sums total is eternal (meaning the universe). [Lat., Summarum summa est aeternum.]
The sum total of all sums total is eternal.
Assuredly whatsoever things are fabled to exist in deep Acheron, these all exist in this life. There is no wretched Tantalus, fearing the great rock that hangs over him in the air and frozen with vain terror. Rather, it is in this life that fear of the gods oppresses mortals without cause, and the rock they fear is any that chance may bring.
(On the temperature of water in wells) The reason why the water in wells becomes colder in summer is that the earth is then rarefied by the heat, and releases into the air all the heat-particles it happens to have. So, the more the earth is drained of heat, the colder becomes the moisture that is concealed in the ground. On the other hand, when all the earth condenses and contracts and congeals with the cold, then, of course, as it contracts, it squeezes out into the wells whatever heat it holds.
We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from.
And since the mind is of a man one part, Which in one fixed place remains, like ears, And eyes, and every sense which pilots life; And just as hand, or eye, or nose, apart, Severed from us, can neither feel nor be, But in the least of time is left to rot, Thus mind alone can never be, without The body and the man himself, which seems, As 'twere the vessel of the same- or aught Whate'er thou'lt feign as yet more closely joined: Since body cleaves to mind by surest bonds.
The sum of all sums is eternity.
So much wrong could religion induce.
And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.
What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?
Victory puts us on a level with heaven.
At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation so not contradict this conclusion or conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born, as I maintain, of the insentient.
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.
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