"Lucretius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments, never attained to a periodic style. And hence we find the same sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of flow and often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than occurs in Plato's earlier writings. The sentences ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... Roman in second century B.C. in regard to (1) his idea of God, (2) his sense of Duty. No help from Epicurism, which provided no religious sanction for conduct; Lucretius, and Epicurean idea of the Divine. Arrival of Stoicism at Rome; Panaetius and the Scipionic circle. Character of Scipio. The religious side of Stoicism; it teaches a new doctrine of the relation of man to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... the fourth of the Argonauticon of Valerius Flaccus. On this discovery being communicated to Francesco Barbaro, the latter in his reply spoke of other discoveries of Bracciolini's, of some of which we have no account as to where they were found, nor when, except before 1414: Tertullian, Lucretius, Silius Italicus, Ammianus Marcelinus, Manilius (his unfinished poem on "Astronomy," clearly a forgery), Lucius Septimius Caper, Eutychius and Probus; and, adds Barbaro, "many others,"—"complures alios," among which Aulus Gellius may be included. All these ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... crying out "Cauneas!" (the name of a kind of figs.) [10] This, Cicero says, was taken as an omen; for it sounded like "Cave ne eas," which must therefore have been pronounced Cau' n' eas. Conversely, in poetry, the vowel v sometimes strengthens into consonant v. Thus in Plautus, Lucretius, and even in Vergil and Statius, this happens in such words as puella, suo, genua, larua, and tenuis. Finally, the fact that both sounds of v are represented by the same character, is evidence that those sounds must have been nearly alike. But the consonant sound that ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... schoolmen who barely allow Homer to be a poet, and set down Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Hesiod, Lucretius, and many others as versifiers, judging them by the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... than Satires: VIII. To Ponticus: XI. To Persicus: and XII. XIII. and XIV to several others: and, in these, leaving out the directly satirical Parts. Satires III and X, like Horace's Poems, are prostituted by Parliamentary and vulgar use, and should lie by for a while. One sees Lucretius, I think, in many parts; but Juvenal can't rise to Lucretius, who is, after all, the true sublime Satirist of poor Man, and of something deeper than his Corruptions and Vices: and he looks on all, too, with 'a Countenance more in Sorrow ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... live three years more, beginning with the year that opens to-morrow? I somehow believe not: which I say not as a doleful thing (indeed you may look at it as a very ludicrous one). Well, we shall see. I am all for the short and merry life. Last night I began the sixth Book of Lucretius in bed. You laugh grimly again? I have not looked into it for more than a year, and I took it up by mistake for one of Swift's dirty volumes; and, having got into bed with it, did not care to get ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Caxton's so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. MSS. were brought out of their hiding places, edited ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the paper and type. A second Horace appeared in 1770 in quarto, and its success encouraged Baskerville to publish a series of quarto editions of Latin authors, which included Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Lucretius, Terence, Sallust and Florus. This list of books issued by Baskerville from his press lends some irony to the allegation that he was a person of no education. These books are admirable specimens of typography; and Baskerville is deservedly ranked among the foremost of those who have advanced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... things otherwise, who had taught unworldliness. Dim enigmatic figures they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Lucretius' irreligion is too strong For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food; I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong, Although no doubt his real intent was good, For speaking out so plainly in his song, So much indeed as to be downright rude; And then what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... antiquity, interrogated as to the cause of these phenomena, were provided with a ready and a plausible answer. It did not enter their minds even to doubt that these low forms of life were generated in the matters in which they made their appearance. Lucretius, who had drunk deeper of the scientific spirit than any poet of ancient or modern times except Goethe, intends to speak as a philosopher, rather than as a poet, when he writes that "with good reason ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... an indifferent good Latinist who might offer good counsel. But be you very careful that you come not against me. You should not escape, but may burrow underground sooner than that. Your Aristotle should not help you, nor Lucretius, nor Lucan, nor Silius Italicus. Diodorus Siculus hath no maxim that should help you against me; but, like Diodorus the Dialectician, you should die of shame. Seneca shall help you if you but dally with that fool thought ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... for his first class. Now, to do this, he wanted the Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric of Aristotle, certain dialogues of Plato, the Comedies of Aristophanes, the first-class Historians, Demosthenes, Lucretius, a Greek Testament, Wheeler's Analysis, Prideaux, Horne, and several books of reference sacred and profane. But he could not get these books without Dr. Wycherley, and unfortunately he had cut that worthy dead in his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... refer the matter of rebuilding to general deliberation, and himself spoke largely and earnestly in behalf of his country, as also may others. At last, calling to Lucius Lucretius, whose place it was to speak first, he commanded him to give his sentence, and the rest as they followed, in order. Silence being made, and Lucretius just about to begin, by chance a centurion, passing by outside with his company of the day-guard, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... We should be sorry to violate any sentiment of [Greek: to semnon] about a man of Macaulay's genius, but what is a decorous term for a description of the doctrine of Lucretius's great poem, thrown in parenthetically, as the 'silliest and meanest system of natural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices of composition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify truth, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphoses; some plays of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Mingault's ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... judges of this by any other of Blackmore's performances will do it injury. The praise given it by Addison (Spectator, 339) is too well known to be transcribed; but some notice is due to the testimony of Dennis, who calls it a "philosophical poem, which has equalled that of 'Lucretius' in the beauty of its versification, and infinitely surpassed it in the solidity and strength ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... writing when he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... with the mark of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals; breathing ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... respects it may be said that didactic poetry affords special facilities to the translator, inasmuch as it bears a more close relation to prose than verse of other descriptions. Didactic poets, such as Lucretius and Pope, are almost forced by the inexorable necessities of their subjects to think in prose. However much we may admire their verse, it is impossible not to perceive that, in dealing with subjects that require great precision of thought, they have ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... to the Jews and their creed without its value, especially when followed, as it is, by Horace's avowal, almost in the words of Lucretius (B. VI. 56), of what was then his own. Later in life he came to a very different conclusion. When the travellers reach Egnatia, their ridicule is excited by being shown or told, it is not very ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—visions something akin, as I imagine, to those experienced by convulsionnaires. And then ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed. The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it? The indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and sprites of steam and electricity,—bringing to each retired nook, and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes, follies, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... scheme which will still enable the humanities to act as some check on the growing materialism of the age; otherwise the last stage of the educated youth of this country will be worse than the first; remember what Lucretius—on the bold assumption that wire-pullers ever read Lucretius—said, "Hic Acherusia stultorum denique vita"; above all things, let there be no panic legislation—and panic is a danger to which democracies and ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Heracles of old To save one stricken child. Is there no song To touch this moving universe of law With ultimate light, the glimmer of that great dawn Which over our ruined altars yet shall break In purer splendour, and restore mankind From darker dreams than even Lucretius knew To vision of that one Power which guides the world. How should men find it? Only through those doors Which, opening inward, in each separate soul Give each man access to that Soul of all Living within each life, not to be ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... required. He may be compared to a clever landscape-gardener, who gives depth and richness to narrow and confined premises by ingenuity and skill in the disposition of his trees and walks. Terence and Lucretius had cultivated simplicity; Cotta, Brutus, and Calvus had attempted strength; but Cicero rather made a language than a style; yet not so much by the invention as by the combination of words. Some terms, indeed, his philosophical subjects obliged him to coin;[257] but his great ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... him, and Rousseau's vision of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus Lucretius. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... nephew, his cousin? These are questions which I do not pretend to answer. For the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the poet's fancy: like the Quintus of Anti Lucretius, "quo nomine," says Polignac, "quemvis Atheum intellige." That this was the case many expressions in the "Night Thoughts" would seem to prove, did not a passage in "Night Eight" appear to show that he had somebody in his eye for ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... overburdened with unreasonable impositions, to those who need consolation and guidance, and to those searching after truth. Addressed, as the LETTERS were, to a lady suffering from religious falsehoods and terrors, the object of the writer is set forth in the motto from Lucretius which he placed on the title page, and which may thus ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... be so much richer than they by so many original productions as we have of our own."[374] Seemingly there was an attempt to naturalize "all Greece and Rome." Anacreon, Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Statius, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Lucan, are names taken almost at random from the list of seventeenth and eighteenth-century translations. Criticism, however, was ready to concern itself with the translation of any classic, ancient or modern. Denham's ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an early writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down upon the confused and erratic state of the world ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... dialogue partly given: a pious wise old gentleman really, in his kind (age now eighty-four); looking mildly forth upon a world just about to overset itself and go topsy-turvy, as he sees it will. His ANTI-LUCRETIUS was once such a Poem!—but we mention him here because his fine Cabinet of Antiques came to Berlin on his death, Friedrich purchasing; and one often hears of it (if one cared to hear) from the Prussian Dryasdust in subsequent ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of the sad belief, and eloquence "like ebony, at once dark and splendid [It was said of Tertullian that 'his style was like ebony, dark and splendid']," how couldst thou, august Lucretius, deem it but sweet to behold from the steep the strife of the great sea, or, safe from the peril, gaze on the wrath of the battle, or, serene in the temples of the wise, look afar on the wanderings of human error? Is ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II. v. 1159). Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus (Epist. I. liv. ii.). "Must our poems, then," ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... mighty Rome!" intending by the first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth book of the AEneid, he applies these very words to Ascanius. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Supreme Being, in spite of the potency which his supposed place as latest evolved out of the ghost-world should naturally give him, is neglected, either as half forgotten, or for philosophical reasons. For these reasons Epicurus and Lucretius make their gods otiosi, unconcerned, and the Wayao, with their universal collective spirit, are ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... was no fleet of the enemy to oppose it—Perseus, who had been prohibited from building ships of war by the treaty with Rome, was only now erecting docks at Thessalonica—but it had on board 10,000 troops, as it was destined chiefly to co-operate in sieges. The fleet was commanded by Gaius Lucretius, the land army by the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... paid a price high enough to the Cardinal de Polignac, he would have betrayed them all. He is now consoling himself in his Abbey with translating Lucretius. ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... If not caused by him, does Shakespeare depart from magic to the detriment of the play? Would it be better, for example, if a love philter was introduced for consistency's sake? (For literary use of the love philter, see Tennyson's 'Lucretius.') Does it reflect against Ferdinand's courage that he was first to quit the ship? Are Miranda's speeches about her grandmother (I, ii, 140) and to Caliban inconsistent with the maidenly innocence ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... intricate as their law, but never quite cared enough about them to believe in them. So it was of no account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva was merely memory. She had never been much else. Nor did they protest when Lucretius dared to say of Ceres and of Liber that they were only the corn of the field and the fruit of the vine. For they had never mourned for the daughter of Demeter in the asphodel meadows of Sicily, nor traversed the glades of Cithaeron with ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, and—most wonderful of all—an Ovid was an amazing achievement, rendered not the less astonishing when it is remembered that the stern bent of the practical Roman mind did not in earlier ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... excellent illustration of this practice. The legend is: 'ChrIstVs DVX ergo trIVMphVs.' Take the capitalized letters or numerals from the words, and arrange them in their proper order, and you have 1627, the year in which the coin was struck. Upon a coin of Trio Lucretius, a member of the Lucretia gens, who would have remained unknown to this day but for his coin, a case of punning by means of types occurs. The obverse has the head of Apollo; the reverse, the crescent moon and seven stars, or rather triones—the constellation of the Ursa Major. The sun and moon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... poets were Ovid and Tibullus; among dramatists, Plautus and Terence; of didactic and philosophic poets, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and Silius Italicus. All these were so many miracles of human genius; and their works afford the models of their respective species of composition. Most of the works of the ancients have in sentiment, if not in ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... us Shall smile if we own that we cannot read Tacitus. No admirer shall ever now weathe with begonias The bust of Suetonius. And so, if you follow me, We'll have to cut Ptolemy. Besides, it would just be considered facetious To look at Lucretius. And you can Not go in Society if 'you read Lucan, And we cannot have ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... first consisted of two books, in which Catulus and Lucullus were the chief speakers. He then rewrote his treatise in four books, making himself, Varro and Atticus the speakers. The Romans at this time had no manuals of philosophy or any philosophical writings in Latin apart from the poem of Lucretius and some unskilful productions by obscure Epicureans. Cicero set himself to supply this want. His works are confessedly in the main translations and compilations (Att. xii. 52. 3); all that he does is to turn the discussion into the form of a dialogue, to adapt ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... total disbelief of the supernatural prevailed in the Epicurean school. A type of the more earnest spirits of this class is seen at a period a little earlier than the Christian era in Lucretius, living mournfully in the moral desert which his doubts had scorched into barrenness.(127) The world is to him a scene unguided by a Providence: death is uncheered by the hope of a future life. An example of the flippant ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... honour, Lucretia, in melancholy distress at so dreadful a misfortune, despatches the same messenger to Rome to her father, and to Ardea to her husband, that they would come each with one trusty friend; that it was necessary to do so, and that quickly.[64] Sp. Lucretius comes with P. Valerius, the son of Volesus, Collatinus with L. Junius Brutus, with whom, as he was returning to Rome, he happened to be met by his wife's messenger. They find Lucretia sitting in her chamber in sorrowful dejection. ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... he exclaimed. "You're the very man I want!" and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... present other phases of thought, apparently irreconcileable with the doctrine that there is nothing other than God. Thus he teaches that there are four elements—earth, air, water and fire—out of which all things are generated. He also anticipates Lucretius in his pessimistic view of humanity's lot; and insists on the apparently independent existence of a principle of discord or strife in the Universe. It would be a forced interpretation to suppose him to have set forth precociously the Darwinian theory of the struggle for ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... and ornaments; and in the National Library, at Paris, many other very fine examples of Neapolitan work. Of the handwriting of Mennius we have a fine example in Add. 11912, which is a quarto copy of Lucretius, written on 160 leaves of vellum. Fol. 1 has a grand border on a gold ground, with a miniature containing a handsome initial E suspended over the author's head, who is seated at a desk writing. The first three lines of the text are in Roman capitals, alternately gold and ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... examine the history of ideas we shall find that they at first exist "in the air." They float about, beautiful alluring visions, ready to be caught and made to serve mortal needs by the right man at the right moment. Thus Empedocles, Lucretius, and the author of "Vestiges of Creation," all found out Darwinism before Mr. Darwin. They spied the idea, but they left it floating; they did not trap it, and break it into scientific harness. Solomon De Caus, as all the world has heard, was put into a lunatic asylum for inventing ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... of them that deal with matter philosophical; either moral, as Tyrtaeus, Phocylides, Cato, or, natural, as Lucretius, Virgil's Georgics; or astronomical, as Manilius {19} and Pontanus; or historical, as Lucan; which who mislike, the fault is in their judgment, quite out of taste, and not in the sweet food of ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Latine inflection; but consists of the terms Cumain, and signifies a hot fountain; or a fountain of Chum, or Cham, the Sun. The country about it was called Phlegra; and its waters are mentioned by Lucretius. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... which means he acquired an equal authority in the Senate with those who had served the office of consul, and though he made no figure in a public debate, he was a serviceable veteran in any suit of a private nature. Q. Lucretius Vispillo was an acute Speaker, and a good Civilian in the same kind of causes: but Osella was better qualified for a public harangue, than to conduct a judicial process. T. Annius Velina was likewise a man of sense, and a tolerable pleader; ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... fortune to particular persons; and it is hard to say whether arms or learning have advanced greater numbers. As for the pleasure and delight thereof, in knowledge there is no satiety. "It is a pleasure incomparable," says Lucretius, "for the mind of man to be settled, landed, and fortified in the certainty of truth; and from thence to descry the errors ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable; and, therefore, appeareth to be good in itself simply, without fallacy or accident. Neither is that pleasure of small efficacy and contentment to the mind of man, which the poet Lucretius describeth elegantly:- ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... demanding more time than the physicist could grant for the age of the habitable world. Darwin himself confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper on Lucretius and the Atomic Theory.' In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from the newspaper reports of this new invention, and lectured on it at a bazaar in Edinburgh, then employed it to study the nature of vowel and consonantal sounds. An interesting paper on Rhythm in English Verse,' was also published ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... people's hands; and the like; tending to the subversion of all government, which is the ordinance of God. For this is but to dash the first table against the second; and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men. Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure the sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed: Tantum Religio ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... time was well occupied and to my personal delight, by chance, I found my constant companion in the person of Dr. Lucretius, the first physician of the Germania, an Italian gentleman. By tokens and signs we found that both of us belong to that great body of men that knows each other as brothers in every corner of the inhabited ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... The word is taken up by Cicero, and he refutes Torquatus. It seems to us, however, that poor Epicurus is but badly treated—as has been generally the case in the prose works which have come down to us. We have, indeed, the poem of Lucretius, and it is admitted that it contains fine passages. But I was always told when young that the writing of it had led him to commit suicide—a deed on his part which seems to have been painted in black colors, though Cato and Brutus, the Stoics, did the same thing very ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... our time it seemed high treason to compare Goethe with Horace, or Schiller with Sophocles. Of late, however, the danger is rather that the reaction should go too far and lead to a promiscuous depreciation even of such real giants as Lucretius or Plato. The fact is that we have learnt from them and imitated them, till in some cases the imitations have equalled or even excelled the originals, while now the taste for classical correctness has been ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... scholar and the worldling, an orator, a musician, a courtier, a linguist,—such was the celebrated Cagliostro. In his abilities, he was as capricious as Leonardo, and as subtle as Macchiavelli; but he was without the magnanimity of the one, or the crafty prudence of the other. Lucretius so darkened the glories of nature by the glooms of his blasphemous imagination, that he might have described this earth as a golden globe animated by a demon. Fashioned in a mould as marvellous as that golden orb, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... He says, "Harnack lays much stress on the fact that inconsistencies and inexactnesses occur all through Acts. Some of these are undeniable; and I have argued that they are to be regarded in the same light as similar phenomena in the poem of Lucretius and in other ancient classical writers, viz., as proofs that the work never received the final form which Luke intended to give it, but was still incomplete when he died. The evident need for a third book to complete ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... itself, but all the natural background and setting of life. The statues of the Greek gods are Olympian in spirit as well as subject. They are like the gods of Epicurus, cut loose alike from the affairs of men, and even the ordered ways of Nature. So Lucretius[53] ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... which I never approached. I will also allow that you hit the manner of Horace and the sly delicacy of his wit more exactly than I, or than any other man who has written since his time. Nor could I, nor did even Lucretius himself, make philosophy so poetical, and embellish it with such charms as you have given to that of Plato, or (to speak more properly) of some of his modern disciples, in your celebrated ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... more commonly regarded such things as means for sharpening his abilities and for imparting distinction in social intercourse. Doubtless there were, and had been, exceptions. No Greek philosopher could be more in earnest than Lucretius, the Roman poet of the later republic, and doubtless there were no few Romans unknown to fame who both grappled seriously with Greek philosophy and also endeavoured to carry it religiously into practice. Yet for the most part the Roman, even when he is a writer upon such subjects, carries ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... surprised to find that the scepticism, which we attribute to young men in our own day, existed then (compare Republic); that the Epicureanism expressed in the line of Horace (borrowed from Lucretius)— ...
— Laws • Plato
... Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, the father of Lucretia, was made consul as the colleague of Valerius Publicola, in the place of Brutus, who had been slain in battle by Aruns, one of the sons ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Menander flourish. Ennius, though rude, and Accius's high-rear'd strain, A fresh applause in every age shall gain, Of Varro's name, what ear shall not be told, Of Jason's Argo and the fleece of gold? Then shall Lucretius' lofty numbers die, When earth and seas in fire and flame shall fry. Tityrus, Tillage, AEnee shall be read, Whilst Rome of all the conquered world is head! Till Cupid's fires be out, and his bow broken, Thy verses, neat Tibullus, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... thunder. As truly say that storms can exhaust the sky, as that poems can exhaust the blue dome of poesy. We doubt, too, the dictum that the earliest poets are uniformly the best. Who knows not that many prefer Eschylus to Homer; and many, Virgil to Lucretius; and many, Milton to Shakspeare; and that a nation sets Goethe above all men, save Shakspeare; and has not the toast been actually given, "To the two greatest of poets—Shakspeare and Byron?" To settle the endless questions connected with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... famous picture by Botticelli is the "Spring," now in the Academy at Florence. The picture has given rise to endless inquiry, and the explanation was made in the artist's day, and is still made, that it was painted to illustrate a certain passage in Lucretius. This innocent little subterfuge of giving a classic turn to things in art and literature has allowed many a man to shield his reputation and gloss his good name. When Art relied upon the protecting wing of the Church, the poet-painters ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... counter-suggestions of a mind sunk in hopeless despondency, and meditating self-destruction, together with the manner of its recovery to a more healthy condition. We have two singularly interesting parallels to it in preceding poetry. The one is in the third book of Lucretius (830-1095), where the arguments for suicide are urged, not merely by the poet himself, but by arguments placed by him in the mouth of Nature herself, and urged with such cogency that they are said to have induced ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... was attempting to defend the religion of the state against its enemies, the poets and the philosophers, a poet, also armed with philosophy, was trying to defend the Roman people against its worst enemy, superstition. It may not seem as though Lucretius belonged among the friends of old Roman religion, and as though the De Rerum Natura were exactly a religious poem, and yet his work was in so far helpful to old Roman religion in that it attacked the excesses of a latter-day superstition which ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... the design of refuting the arguments of the sceptics which Bayle had been renewing in his dictionary; but his public occupations hindered him. Two exiles at length fortunately gave him the leisure; and the Anti-Lucretius is the fruit of the court disgraces ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... prettiness rather than with majestical beauty. I would neither wish that my mistress, nor my fortune, should be a bona roba, nor, as Homer used to describe his beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter, for the stateliness and largeness of her person, but, as Lucretius says, "Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text which cannot ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... form a proper prelude to the criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found its most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true Roman, gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the uncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race. Holding, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to the authoritative definitions by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails the theory of fetishism as if it stood now where De Brosses left it in a purely pioneer work—or, rather, where he understands De Brosses to have left it. One might as well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius left it, or the theory of evolution where it was ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... prose romance entitled The Epicure'an. Lucretius the Roman poet, in his De Rerum Natura, is an exponent of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Agassiz, that life has not grown out of the necessary action of the physical laws. If we accept the customary definitions of the physical laws, we accede most cordially to his proposition. As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance. When we remember that the genius of such a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... delicate and idle life immersed in sloth and pleasure, escaping like a runaway from the honor of Parnassus, the Lyceum and the Academy, into the lodgings of Epicurus, and should harbor in those lodgings in a quarter where neither Virgil nor Catullus nor Horace nor Lucretius himself had ever stayed.' This excited such indignation in the poet's breast that: 'I said oftentimes with open face and free speech that I would rather be a servant of any prince his enemy than submit to this indignity, and in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Romans, we find Lucretius comparing the beauties of his great poem to the sweet yellow honey, with which doctors are wont to anoint the rim of the cup containing their bitter drugs. Horace, as so frequently, takes his inspiration from the Greek, when he offers the double view of art: as courtezan and as pedagogue. In his ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... of things. "Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" is the cry of Hebrew piety as well as of modern science; and the "majestas cognita rerum,"—the recognized majesty of the universe—teaches Lucretius only the indifference of gods and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... a dim, twilight, shadowy world where the ghosts of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they sometimes returned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed the belief that all things ended with death—'Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... ended not long after winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's application was far too desultory to make ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Lucretius (i. 291) has "gremium matris terrai." Mitford adds the pathetic sentence of Pliny, Hist. Nat. ii. 63: "Nam terra novissime complexa gremio jam a reliqua natura abnegatos, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... author is not Dr. Busby himself, I think it a pity, on his own account, that he should dedicate it to his subscribers; nor can I perceive what Dr. Busby has to do with the matter except as a translator of Lucretius, for whose doctrines he is surely not responsible. I tell you openly, and really most sincerely, that, if published at all, there is no earthly reason why you should not; on the contrary, I should receive it as the greatest compliment you could pay to your good opinion of my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that the atheistic Lucretius has given us a most glowing description of the Olympian mansions; but perhaps the Olympus of the Epicurean poet and philosopher is somewhat higher up and more sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... seed. 'With every language you learn,' he had said, 'you will gain a nation.' But there were many peoples in her father's kingdom, and when she was Queen they must all love her. True, she began with the tongue of the conquerors, not the conquered. So it happened that we first learned Lucretius, who reproduces in verse the doctrines of Epicurus. My father was our teacher, and the second year she read Lucretius as if it were a Greek book. She had only half known Egyptian; now she speedily acquired it. During our stay at Philae she found a troglodyte who was induced to teach her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilisation, not by external guidance or as a consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long period. [Footnote: Lucretius v. 1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... those values which are given him; and can we not also infer something of the unknown from the great panorama that passes unceasingly before us? The one thing that Hawthorne could not have understood was, how gifted minds like Lucretius and Auguste Comte could recognize only the evidence of their senses, and deliberately blind themselves to the evidence of their intellects. He who denies the existence of mind as a reality resembles a person looking for his spectacles when they are on his nose; but it is the imagination ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Verna, cruelly dilapidated; finally a small triumphal arch on which there stood, perhaps, a quadriga, or four-yoked chariot-team; some pedestals of statues erected to illustrious Pompeians, to Pansa, to Sallust, to Marcus Lucretius, Decidamius Rufus; some inscriptions in honor of this one or that one, of the great Romulus, of the aged AEneas,—when all these have been seen, or glanced at, at least, you will have made the ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... now restored to favour and placed at the head of the Royal Typography. Signor Andreoni received me with every mark of esteem, and after having shown me some of the finest examples of his work—such as the Pindar, the Lucretius and the Dante—accompanied me to a neighbouring coffee-house, where I was introduced to several lovers of agriculture. Here I learned some particulars of the Duke's attempted reforms. He has undertaken the work of draining ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... much in another direction, among those who "reason of" the highest things. Especially I have been interested in what those old [333] atheists, Lucretius and Omar Khayyam, say. Have you seen the "Rubaiyat" of the latter? And, by the bye, have you an English translation of Lucretius's "De Rerurn Natura"? It must be a small volume, only six books; and if it is not too precious an edition, I pray you to lend and ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... idyl of the same genre as Idyl IV. The sturdy reaper, Milon, as he levels the swathes of corn, derides his languid and love-worn companion, Buttus. The latter defends his gipsy love in verses which have been the keynote of much later poetry, and which echo in the fourth book of Lucretius, and in the Misanthrope of Moliere. Milon replies with the song of Lityerses—a string, apparently, of popular rural couplets, such as Theocritus may have ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... religious, and his gods must go with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation: ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... language The Hebrew answer to these questions The legend of the Tower of Babel The real reason for the building of towers by the Chaldeans and the causes of their ruin Other legends of a confusion of tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.—Marini Capellus and his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Aristotle, the philosophers of Greece and Rome made little contribution to morphological theory. Passing mention may be made of the Atomists—Leucippus, Democritus, and their great disciple Lucretius, who in his magnificent poem "De Natura Rerum" gave impassioned expression to the materialistic conception of the universe. But the full effect of materialism upon morphology does not become apparent till the rise of physiology in the 17th ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... up by the Jewish people. And yet Rome conquered the world, and even conquered God's chosen people. The people that had the bible were defeated by the people who had not. How was it possible for Lucretius to get along without the bible? How did the great and glorious of that empire? And what shall we say of Greece? No bible. Compare Athens with Jerusalem. From Athens comes the beauty and intellectual grace of the world. Compare the mythology ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... those of the latter time we find intermediaries, ancient if they be compared with our own age, but modern if we think of the foundations of learning, and these men we consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the Latins, have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius, and Homer, and had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless again and again he had read somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence he could by no means imitate? What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus, and in short the whole troop of ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... epistle. If I err in my conjecture, I expect the like from you, in putting our correspondence so long in quarantine. God he knows what I have said; but he also knows (if he is not as indifferent to mortals as the nonchalant deities of Lucretius), that you are the last person I want to offend. So, if I have,—why the devil don't you say it at once, and expectorate ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Praenestine[257], L. Nassius a colonist. Q. Caleius and C. Sertorius, the quaestors of the same year, do not appear in the inscriptions of Praeneste except here, and it is impossible to say more than that Sertorius is a good Roman name, and Caleius a good north Italian one.[258] C. Salvius and T. Lucretius, duovirs for the next year, the recurrence of Salvius in another inscription,[259] L. Curtius and C. Vibius, the aediles,—Statiolenus and C. Cassius, the quaestors, show the same phenomenon, for it seems quite possible from other inscriptional evidence to claim Salvius, Vibius,[260] and ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... Matthews Duncan, are compliments of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed. There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the Capitol ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head. "You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human." "Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later, after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the conquest ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... so sage LUCRETIUS wrote of yore, To watch a storm-tossed vessel from the shore, Or safely placed, when hosts in conflict close, To view the battle as it ebbs and flows; But he, poor ancient, never knew the rare Delight afforded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... to the number that fell, because several of equestrian rank, and five tribunes of the soldiers, and three prefects of the allies were slain. After this battle Hannibal retired to the territory of the Ligurians, and Sempronius to Luca. Two Roman quaestors, Caius Fulvius and Lucius Lucretius, who had been treacherously intercepted, with two military tribunes and five of the equestrian order, mostly sons of senators, are delivered up to Hannibal when coming among the Ligurians, in order that he might feel more convinced that the peace and alliance with them ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... deficience cannot be supplied. He seems not born to greatness and elevation. He is never lofty, nor does he often surprise with unexpected excellence: but, perhaps, to his last poem may be applied what Tully said of the work of Lucretius, that "it is written with much art, though with few ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... History, affirms that death is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman is so insane ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... valuable result to English poetry of the academic attempts, towards the end of the sixteenth century, to write classical verse in English. It could be pointed out triumphantly that all the splendid poetry of classical antiquity—Homer and Lucretius and Virgil, Sappho and Catullus and Horace and Ovid—had been independent of rime; and whatever might be the disagreement on quantitative feet in English, it was impossible to deny that English could successfully copy this element of the great classical verse ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call "imagination" and "invention," the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure as ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sent a post to Rome to her father, and an other to Ardea to her husbande, requiringe them that they would make speede to come vnto her, with certaine of their trustie frendes, for that a cruell facte was chaunced. Then Sp. Lucretius with P. Valerius the sonne of Volesius, and Collatinus with L. Iunius Brutus, made hast to Lucrece: where they founde her sitting, very pensife and sadde, in her chamber. So sone as she sawe them she began pitiously to weepe. ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... Miss Aikin has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their manner with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... English cottager impresses it on the youthful mind that it is wicked to point at the stars, though why he cannot tell. But the Pitris are not stars only, nor do they content themselves with idly looking down on the affairs of men, after the fashion of the laissez-faire divinities of Lucretius. They are, on the contrary, very busy with the weather; they send rain, thunder, and lightning; and they especially delight in rushing over the housetops in a great gale of wind, led on by their chief, the mysterious huntsman, Hermes ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... philosophy in which he determined to include Marcella. From Edinburgh came boxes of books—and a queer assortment of books they were. Locke and Berkeley, James' "Natural Religion," Renan's "Life of Christ," a very bad translation of Lucretius; Frazer's "Golden Bough," a good deal of Huxley and Darwin, and many of the modern writers. They were something amazingly new to him, and Marcella used to watch him sitting in the fireless book-room ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more about them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them—through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and what not—he ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece; certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that disbelief, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... and Petrarch's? "My lady was desired in the high heaven." ... I see now how in Heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage. Far flowing ramparts of a starry world! The flammantia moenia mundi of Lucretius. To contemplate Beauty FACE TO FACE! What a wonderful proof of the beauty of our souls. Twin mirrors of a single singing thought, the face of man looking into the Face of God, soul mingling with Soul in immortal music, bathed in the cool wind of Our Lady's eyes. Today I lost a nation in the ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... flatter, shall Menander flourish. Rude Ennius, and Plautus[225] full of wit, Are both in Fame's eternal legend writ. 20 What age of Varro's name shall not be told, And Jason's Argo,[226] and the fleece of gold? Lofty Lucretius shall live that hour, That nature shall dissolve this earthly bower. AEneas' war and Tityrus shall be read, While Rome of all the conquered[227] world is head. Till Cupid's bow, and fiery shafts be broken, Thy verses, sweet Tibullus, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... starting up and striding over the earth—"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... you attribute to science what in many cases has been the result of accident. The processes of most of the useful arts, which you call chemical, have been invented and improved without any refined views, without any general system of knowledge. Lucretius attributes to accident the discovery of the fusion of the metals; a person in touching a shell-fish observes that it emits a purple liquid as a dye, hence the Tyrian purple; clay is observed to harden in the fire, and hence the invention of bricks, which could ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... of the system of Lucretius, in which he describes man emerging from barbarity, acquiring the use of language, and the knowledge of various useful and polite arts, is comprised in a few lines of a satire of Horace, lib. i. sat. iii. v. 97. It has been ingeniously ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... Strada (Prolusion v. vi.) allows him to contend with the five heroic poets, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. His patron is the accomplished courtier Balthazar Castiglione. His admirers are numerous and passionate. Yet the rigid critics reproach the exotic weeds, or flowers, which spring too luxuriantly in his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... have about Memmius is that, in agitated times, he thought it his duty to attend exclusively to politics, and that his friends could not venture, except when the Republic was quiet and prosperous, to intrude on him with their philosophical and poetical productions. It is on this account that Lucretius puts up the exquisitely beautiful prayer for peace with which his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Gardenstown, who met Beattie in a romantic glen near his house, with pencil and paper in his hand—entered into conversation with him—found out that he was a poet—and gave him the "Invocation to Venus" in the opening of Lucretius, to translate, which he did on the spot, and thus removed some doubts Lord Gardenstown had entertained as to whether his poetry was actually his own; and, besides, Lord Monboddo, a remarkable man, alike in talent and eccentricity; and both vied with each other in their patronage ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... him far from shrine and throne On ways untrodden where his fathers trod Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan. From bonds and torments and the ravening flame Surely thy spirit of sense rose up to greet Lucretius, where such only spirits meet, And walk with him apart till Shelley came To make the heaven of heavens more heavenly sweet And mix with yours a third ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 50-49, appointed Caesar's successor in Gaul, defended Marseilles against him, and eventually fell in the battle of Pharsalia. P. Nigidius Figulus supported Cicero during the Catiline conspiracy. Gaius Memmius, aedile B.C. 60 (see p. 51). Lucretius dedicated his poem to him. L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus, consul B.C. 49, accused Clodius in B.C. 61, murdered in Africa after Pompey, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... departure—restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has the past, and does the present. What the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says: ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... which I have seen an excellent example when I was in the presence of his Tzarskoy majesty, yet is more properly used concerning the calmness of the weather, or season. So that even the night is elegantly called Serena by the best Authors, Cicero in Arato 12, Lucretius i. l. 29. 'Serena nox'; and upon perusing again what I have writ in this paper, I finde that I have out of the customariness of that expression my self near the beginning said, And that most serene night, &c. Whereas on the contrary Illustris in its ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... the earlier days of Athens, and that he could never catch the spirit of that golden time, but he loved it none the less. He was also a philosopher in his way. He had read not only the literature of Greece, but that of his adopted land, and he was especially familiar with Lucretius and his pupil Virgil. His intellectual existence, however, was not particularly happy. Rome was a pleasant city; his occupation was one in which he delighted; the thrill of a newly noticed Lucretian idea or of a tender touch in Virgil were better to him than any sensual pleasure, but his ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic conception of God (God ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... content, or in their content alone. It is quite a different question, therefore, whether one may derive a satisfactory pleasure and benefit from a translation of the Agamemnon of AEschylus or Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, of Lucretius or Tacitus, to say nothing of such books ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of this business in the senate, if anything occurs which you ought to know, or even if there is nothing, I will write you something every day. On the 12th I will not fail you or Pomponius. The poems of Lucretius are as you say— with many flashes of genius, yet very technical. But when you return, . . . if you succeed in reading the Empedoclea of Sallustius, I shall regard you as a ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... little conversant with modern literature, as he proved by his memorable editions of Gray and Pope. The expression is evidently borrowed not from Hesiod, nor from Lucretius, but from a brother ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and men of note. Not a few of the citizens also, who had come to see the fight, were killed and trampled down, so that it was thought all was over with the city, and the blockade of Marius was all but raised, for many of the fugitives made their way to Praeneste, and urged Ofella Lucretius,[280] who had been appointed to conduct the siege, to break up his quarters with speed, as Sulla was killed, and Rome in the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... who had to live by his wit wrote plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not. It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most brilliant and spiritstirring. But nature, profuse to him of many rare gifts, had withheld from him the dramatic faculty. Nevertheless all the energies of his best years were wasted on dramatic composition. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 3. Turpiculo naso. The kind of nose alluded to is such as sheep or goats have. Cf. Lucretius, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... poems are simply waking dreams. They are spontaneous incarnations of sensuous imagery, which has no need of morals or definite logical schemes. Although he expected Wordsworth to transmute philosophy into poetry, he admitted that the achievement would be unprecedented. Even in Lucretius, he said, what was poetry was not philosophy, and what was philosophy was not poetry. Yet Coleridge's philosophy was essentially the philosophy of a poet. He had, indeed, great dialectical ingenuity—a faculty which may certainly be allied ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... However far back we go, admiring memory looks farther. Homer and Virgil never let their hero throw a stone without reminding us that modern heroes only live in glass houses, to have stones thrown at them. Lucretius and Juvenal chant the same lament. Xenophon, mourning the march of luxury among the Persians, says that modern effeminacy has reached such a pitch, that men have even devised coverings for their fingers, called gloves. Herodotus narrates, that, when Cambyses sent ambassadors to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, chief town of the Puy de Dome department, whose name is more known to motorists than to philosophers. The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand he displayed his ability in "the humanities" by the publication of an excellent edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and the philosophy of the poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions are sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France. While teaching and lecturing in this beautiful ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... lines in which the votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or fifteen centuries later in his native ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... accurately enquired into, would afford a clew to many puzzling phenomena in the theory of dreams. This peculiarity of the organ of touch, as also that it is confined to no particular organ, but is diffused over the whole person of the man, is noticed by Lucretius:— ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... men the use of grain and the arts of farming-rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave men a new hope of eternal life. The Mother of the Gods, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; and her cult spread all over the world. When the Roman poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder and magic of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to the pomp of Cybele. The nearest thing to it which we can imagine is Botticelli's picture of the Triumph of Spring. Lucretius was a poet to whom the gods were idle and irrelevant; yet ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... conviction of their ideal strength and their real weakness. The insolent triumph of the mediocre adds to this sadness. But it is not quite without sweetness. It has something of the pleasure extolled by Lucretius in the famous verses on those temples of the calm faith from which the sage regards the wild struggle of the passions. But the superior man of to-day will never know the full enjoyment which the nervous systems of the ancients permitted them. The mind can do ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... William Thomson's pregnant hypothesis is that the absolute hardness which has been attributed to material atoms from the time of Lucretius downward may be dispensed with. Somewhat in the same way that a loosely suspended chain becomes rigid with rapid rotation, the hardness and elasticity of the vortex-atom are explained as due to the swift rotary motion ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta, with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself more free to introduce what ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Alexandria still ran on, and there might have been a return to the saner early doctrines, but at last Alexandrian culture was extinguished in the blood of the aged Hypatia, and the night fell. Rome had had no genius for science; though Lucretius gave an immortal expression to the views of Democritus and Epicurus, and such writers as Cicero and Pliny did great service to a later age in preserving fragments of the older discoveries. The curtains were once more drawn about the earth. The glimpses which adventurous ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... amount of evidence to prove the existence of these tenets has been collected by Mr. Tylor, and is accessible to all in the chapters on "Animism" in his Primitive Culture. It is not our business here to account for the universality of the belief in spirits. Mr. Tylor, following Lucretius and Homer, derives the belief from the reasonings of early men on the phenomena of dreams, fainting, shadows, visions caused by narcotics, hallucinations, and other facts which suggest the hypothesis of a separable life apart from the bodily organism. It would scarcely be fair not ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... divisions the works of Latin and Greek writers under the Empire will be more closely studied, and detailed essays will discuss their various systems, e.g. Cicero, Manilius, Lucretius, Seneca, Aristides, Appuleius, and the New Platonists of Alexandria ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of Rome, as an illustration of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that 'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... us, man's "very existence is an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets"?—and shall such a one, member of such a race, dream of prolonging his atomic existence world without end? As Lucretius asked:— ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... progresses with a cumulative force. It draws sustenance from the recorded opinions of others. The points usually owe consistency and firmness to quotations from old authors—Greek and Latin authors, especially Plato and Plutarch, Lucretius and Seneca. To Bacon, as to all professed students of the subject, philosophy first revealed itself in the pages of the Greek writers, Plato and Aristotle, the founders for modern Europe of the speculative sciences of human ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... mental character of Lucretius has been well analysed by Mr. Sellar, in the volume ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... one Easter night, When the gay gods too blest to be polite Gods at their ease, like those of learned Lucretius, Laught, whistled, groaned, uproariously facetious— A well-drest member of the middle gallery, Whose "ears polite" disdained such low canaillerie, Rose in his place—so grand, you'd almost swear Lord Winchelsea himself stood towering there— And like ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... eschewed. The exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must, in different ages of literature, have excited very different expectations; for example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, or Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Metcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Pope.' And then, in a kind of vexed way, Wordsworth ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... French have reclaimed their prisoners. The Duke is coming back. I fear his candles are gone to bed to Admiral Vernon's! He has been ill; they say his head has been more affected than his body. Marshal Saxe sent him Cardinal Polignac's Anti-Lucretius(1393) to send to Lord Chesterfield. If he won't let him be a general, at least 'tis hard to reduce him ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... America, listening too with passionate fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established order of things in their ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... versification. Against these ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement. In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had sought ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair |
