Lucretius Light Quotations

Truths kindle light for truths.

You alone govern the nature of things. Without you nothing emerges into the light of day, without you nothing is joyous or lovely.

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.

I return to the newborn world, and the soft-soil fields, What their first birthing lifted to the shores Of light, and trusted to the wayward winds. First the Earth gave the shimmer of greenery And grasses to deck the hills; then over the meadows The flowering fields are bright with the color of springtime, And for all the trees that shoot into the air.

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 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 day, but by the aspect and law of nature.

Epicurus ... whose genius surpassed all humankind, extinguished the light of others, as the stars are dimmed by the rising sun.

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.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

The gods and their tranquil abodes appear, which no winds disturb, nor clouds bedew with showers, nor does the white snow, hardened by frost, annoy them; the heaven, always pure, is without clouds, and smiles with pleasant light diffused. [Lat., Apparet divom numen, sedesque quietae; Quas neque concutiunt ventei, nec nubila nimbeis. Aspergunt, neque nex acri concreta pruina Cana cadens violat; semper sine nubibus aether Integer, et large diffuso lumine ridet.]