"Lucretius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worth noting that of Sheridan's hypothetical colleagues in office under the Prince Regent in the Cabinet outlined in February 1789, not one now supported him. Fox was not present, being engrossed in Lucretius and the "Poetics" of Aristotle. He, however, informed Lord Holland that he detested the Union and all centralized Governments, his predilection being for Federalism.[556] The remark merits notice in view of the concentration of power in France, and in her vassal ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... 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 ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeos, "Concerning Nature"; according to the manner of Pythagoras, "his golden verses," of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... History—all palimpsests—were in some French centre in the Middle Ages, as may be seen from the indisputably eighth-century French writing which covers the ancient texts. The student of Latin literature knows that the manuscript tradition of Lucretius, Suetonius, Caesar, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius—to mention only the greatest names—shows that we are indebted primarily to Gallia Christiana for the preservation of ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... sweet, 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 by an easy-chair, Wherein the slippered critic, at his ease, His ample writing-pad upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... 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, to quicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and habitual recourse ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... compensation. But," he continued after a pause, "this is all folly! Solitude makes a dreamer of me—I am sighing for my friends as a lover sighs for his sweetheart! Am I then so entirely alone? Have I not my books? Come, Lucretius, thou friend in good and evil days; thou sage, thou who hast never left me without counsel and consolation! Come and cheer thy pupil—teach him how to laugh at this ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... and Euripides preceded the historians and moralists of Greece, not only Naevius and Ennius, who wrote the Roman history in verse, but Lucilius, Plautus, Terence, and we may add Lucretius, were prior to Cicero, Sallust, or Caesar. Dante and Petrarch went before any good prose writer in Italy; Corneille and Racine brought on the fine age of prose compositions in France; and we had in England, not only Chaucer and Spenser, but Shakspeare and Milton, while our attempts ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... 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 proper person can be partial To all those ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that wedlock to this my follower, Madness; and what you owe to me I have already told you. Again, she that has but once tried what it is, would she, do you think, make a second venture if it were not for my other companion, Oblivion? Nay, even Venus herself, notwithstanding whatever Lucretius has said, would not deny but that all her virtue were lame and fruitless without the help of my deity. For out of that little, odd, ridiculous May-game came the supercilious philosophers, in whose room ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... 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
... by Xenophanes of Colophon. Driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to earn his living as a wandering minstrel, he developed the ideas of Anaximander, and founded the school of great philosophic poets, to which Parmenides, Empedocles and Lucretius belong. He is the grand monotheist, and he has published his doctrines ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... reader would even be glad of a jolt now and then; almost anything rather than this eternally grave gliding manner, in which the end is like the beginning, the beginning like the middle, and the quorsum haec? seldom answered with anything like energy. If we take an Essay like that on "Lucretius," we become conscious, indeed, of an effort, but it seems rather an effort to lift a weight, than the effort of a living mind in free movement over a large subject. Inevitably we have much that is true, very much of refinement and accomplishment, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... 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
... ensuing year, with Figulus and Lucius Caesar in office, notable events were few, but worthy of remembrance in view of the contradictions in human affairs. For the man[16] who had slain Lucretius at the instance of Sulla and another[17] who had murdered many of the persons proscribed by him were tried for the slaughter and punished,—Julius Caesar being most instrumental in bringing this about. Thus the changes of affairs often render those once thoroughly powerful exceedingly weak. ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... kind is 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 sweetly ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... return it in 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the evil may be felt; but at the same time the sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness. This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls "sweet" in the famous lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the picture ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... productions of the Baskerville press for its correctness and for the beauty of 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... For the subject, as unpromising as it seemeth at first view, is no less than that of Lucretius, to free men's minds from the bondage of religion; and this not by little hints and by piecemeal, after the manner of those little atheistical tracts that steal into the world, but in a thorough wholesale ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... of 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 and 18th centuries, and reaches its culmination in the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... period Casimire's fame was again revived. While still a young man, Coleridge planned a complete translation of Casimire's odes, but never finished more than the ode "Ad Lyram." It was also Coleridge who said that with the exception of Lucretius and Statius he knew no Latin poet, ancient or modern, who could be said to equal Casimire in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification.[8] A knowledge of the themes and techniques of this Latin poet should therefore be of interest ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... author's own ground. The proposal of it is no new thing. In one or another form, varying in particulars, but agreeing in substance, it has been before the world ever since the days of Democritus, and more especially of his follower, Epicurus. Lucretius clothed it in sonorous and majestic verse, for it is a theme fitted above all others to excite the fancy, and to receive the richest embellishments from the imagination. Modern authors have promulgated ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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
... 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 by scholars and spread ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the late Duke's reign for suspected liberal tendencies, but is 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 ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... to your whim," you will reply: "Doubtless there are no longer masters to-day; but go back to the first ages of the globe, when the world in its newness, as Lucretius has so superbly said, as yet knew neither bitter cold nor excessive heat (9/8.); an eternal springtide bathed the earth, and the insects, not dying, as to-day, at the first touch of frost, two successive generations ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... of 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
... nothing for the Roman Empire. He let the men come up by chance. His time was taken 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 of Greece with the mythology of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the sun and the return of the ice-caps does not ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... obvious that you will perhaps wonder at my dwelling upon it; but it really marks a turning point in our notions of force. You have probably heard of certain philosophers of the ancient world named Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. These men adopted, developed, and diffused the doctrine of atoms and molecules, which found its consummation at the hands of the illustrious John Dalton. But the Greek and Roman philosophers I have named, and their followers, up to the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 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
... him. Those seven wise men of Greece, those Britain Druids, Indian Brachmanni, Ethiopian Gymnosophist, Magi of the Persians, Apollonius, of whom Philostratus, Non doctus, sed natus sapiens, wise from his cradle, Epicurus so much admired by his scholar Lucretius: ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... notions, as the logicians call them) has been founded on the conjunction of two natures, which have a real separate being. So hippocentaurs were imaged, by joining the natures of a man and horse together; as Lucretius tells us, who has used this word of image oftener ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general, the two opposing agencies ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... it had the power of communicating its attractive property to iron, for we read in Plato's "Ion" that a number of iron rings can be supported in a chain by the Heraclean Stone. Lucretius also describes an experiment in which iron filings are made to rise up and "rave" in a brass basin by a magnet held underneath. We are told by other writers that images of the gods and goddesses were suspended in the air by lodestone in the ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... 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 found ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... called 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, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... excitement caused in the nervous system by such potions frequently proved fatal. Such, according to Eusebius, was the fate of the poet Lucretius, who, having been driven to madness by an amatory potion, and having, during the intervals of his insanity, composed several books, which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, died by his own hand, in the 44th year of his age.[97] It should, however, be remembered that this account ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... BANBURY, who is naturally a champion of cakes—and ale—made a despairing effort to preserve the privileges of the Palace of Westminster, but did not carry his protest to a division; and after a few valedictory remarks from Colonel LOCKWOOD, including two quotations from LUCRETIUS (derived from a crib, as he modestly explained), the House unanimously decided that its habits should be in conformity with its debates—dry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to follow their development we should have to write the history of human thought which they have always accompanied since the time of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The first observers who noticed that the volume of a body could be diminished by compression or cold, or augmented by heat, and who saw a soluble solid body mix completely with the water which dissolved it, must have been compelled to ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... case the sovereignty of Ireland relapses into the hands of the permanent officials, that camarilla of Olympians. To the official lives of these gentlemen, regarded as works of art, I raise my hat in respectful envy. They have realised the vision of Lucretius. From the secure remoteness of their ivory towers they look down unmoved on the stormy and drifting tides below, and they enjoy the privilege, so rare in Ireland, of knowing the causes of things. To the ordinary man their political origins ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... of men in his position. Thus, too, he learned much about the country and about all branches of rural economy. He had not yet seriously given himself to literature, although his third work was published in 1656, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Cerus de Rerum Natura. Interpreted and made ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... declared that he should nominate as dictator Marcus Valerius Messala, who then commanded the fleet in Sicily; but the fathers denied that a person could be appointed dictator who was not in the Roman territory, and this was limited by Italy. Marcus Lucretius, a plebeian tribune, having taken the sense of the senate upon the question, it was decreed, "that the consul before he quitted the city, should put the question to the people, as to whom they wished to be appointed dictator, and that he should nominate ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... letter which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Dann. Named for Lucretius Epicuraeus, a contemporary of Cicero. List. ab authore cui in usu fuit ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... 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
... Sallust to the decline of the language and empire of Rome." In one year he read over the following authors: Virgil, Sallust, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Quintus Curtius, Justin, Florus, Plautus, Terence, and Lucretius. We may take his word when he says that this review, however rapid, was neither hasty nor superficial. Gibbon had the root of all scholarship in him, the most diligent accuracy and an unlimited faculty of taking pains. But he was a great scholar, not a ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Excepting Varro, who was born but ten years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose language we regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace, was born eight years after Cicero. In a great degree Cicero formed the Latin language—or produced that manipulation of it which has made it so graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Ovid's Elegies, Odes of Horace, London 1864. He translated likewise the Epistle of Phaedra to Hyppolitus, printed in the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, by several hands. He wrote the Prologue to Mrs. Bhon's City Heiress. Prefixed to Creechis Lucretius, there is a copy of verses written by Mr. Otway, in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... disgust—a fear quite distinct from that of losing a sexual lure or breaking a rule of social etiquette—plays a very large part in the modesty of the more modest sex, and in modesty generally. Our Venuses, as Lucretius long since remarked and Montaigne after him, are careful to conceal from their lovers the vita postscenia, and that fantastic fate which placed so near together the supreme foci of physical attraction and physical repugnance, has immensely contributed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... matter for even Aristophanes to make fun of, and the annalist of the war between the States will not find any parallel in the chronicles of the South. There was no such epidemic as still shows its livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the verses of Lucretius. True, some diseases of which civic life makes light proved to be veritable scourges in camp. Measles was especially fatal to the country-bred, and for abject misery I have never seen anything like those cases of measles in which nostalgia had supervened. Nostalgia, which we are apt to sneer at ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... Matthiae remarks, is taken in two senses; as a preposition with [Greek: gynaikos], ob improbam mulierem, and as a substantive, with [Greek: acharin] added. Cf. AEsch. Choeph. 44. Lucretius uses a similar oxymoron respecting the same subject, i. 99. "Sed casta inceste nubendi tempore in ipso Hostia ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... he said, 'it is not upon my head that I do not wed this wench. You be my witness that I would wed; it gores my heart to see her look so pale. It tears my vitals to see any woman look pale. As Lucretius says, "Better the sunshine ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... than ten years. Time should not be allowed to pass without yielding fruits, in the form of something learnt worthy of being known, some good principle cultivated, or some good habit strengthened. Dr. Mason Good translated Lucretius while riding in his carriage in the streets of London, going the round of his patients. Dr. Darwin composed nearly all his works in the same way while driving about in his "sulky" from house to house in ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... from the drawingroom window. The voices of Miss Lentaigne and his uncle reached him, the one high-pitched and firm, the other, as he imagined, apologetic and deprecatory. The sound of them, the words being indistinguishable, was somewhat soothing. Frank felt as the poet Lucretius did when from the security of a sheltered nook on the side of a cliff he watched boats tossing on the sea. The sense of neighbouring strain and struggle added to the completeness of his own repose. A bed of mignonette scented the air agreeably. Some white ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... recognized three ages: (1) from the beginning of mankind to the Deluge, a quite indefinite period; (2) from the Deluge to the First Olympiad, called the Mythical Period; (3) from the First Olympiad to his own time, called the Historic Period. Lucretius divided man's history into three cultural periods: (1) the Age of Stone; (2) the Age of Bronze; (3) the Age of Iron. He thus anticipated the conclusions of some of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... appeared in bygone ages, suddenly 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 ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... and sometimes a whole one, 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... lore, Mosaic dreams in Genesis explore, Doat with Copernicus, or darkling stray With Newton, Ptolemy, or Tycho Brahe! To you I sing not, for I sing of truth, Primeval systems, and creation's youth; Such as of old, with magic wisdom fraught, Inspired LUCRETIUS to ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... of a noble Roman, Spurius Lucretius, who was at this time prefect of the city; for it was the custom, when the kings went out to war, that they left a chief man at home to administer all things in the king's name, and he was called prefect ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... by violence and lawlessness, and whose murderers I am now hunting down.' [Sidenote: by Metellus Pius;] Quintus Metellus Pius came from Liguria, whither he had escaped from Africa, after holding out there against the Marians as long as he could. [Sidenote: by Ofella;] Quintus Lucretius Ofella also came, soon to find to his cost that he had chosen a master who could as readily forget as accept timely service. [Sidenote: by Cn. Pompeius;] Most welcome of all was Cneius Pompeius, welcome not only for his talents, energy, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... especially in 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 ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... 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 possession of ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we do do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... minds, weighed down under the 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 a great deal, but it is powerless ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... and the golden age far beyond 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
... Jove. 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 Fright became ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... tormenting him the whole way. Pliny, in his Natural 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 as ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... unequally suggestive to me. Classic literature has only few paths outwards for me—Tacitus, Lucretius, Juvenal, Homer, and Saint-Simon excepted. I read the other authors of this class partly for themselves, without making a comparison. On the other hand, the reading of Dante, Shakespeare, St. Jerome's compact verses on the Hebrew, and Middle Age prose excites ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Although Lucretius may not have been assured of the moral value, he was so convinced of the seductive powers of poetry that he deliberately utilized them to make palatable the forbidding thoughts of his essay On the Nature of Things. ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... from 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. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in the late Republic, the Rome of Cicero, was 'enlightened,' as was the Greece of Lucian; that is the educated classes were enlightened. Yet Lucretius, writing only for the educated classes, feels obliged to combat the belief in ghosts and the kind of Calvinism which, but for his poem, we should not know to have been widely prevalent. Lucian, too, mocks frequently at educated belief in just ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... to many writers, both ancient and modern; it has been occasionally asserted from the times of Anaximander and Lucretius to those of Bacon and ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... very fair wench, made for love and such stuff. You are 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
... ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts of Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles, to say nothing of other ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those works of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... is Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for his lyrics. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in the Aeneid, has produced a genuine Roman epic, although his dependence on Homer is obvious throughout, and in ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... can, even in dying, wholly detach himself from the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there is in him something that survives him, and cannot sufficiently separate or emancipate himself from his remains" —Lucretius, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Ptolemy was a votary of Cybele, and a spiritual ancestor of General Booth. The worship of Cybele is well described by Lucretius, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... appropriately close this chapter than by quoting the magnificent verse of Lucretius, which brings before us, better than could a long description, the condition of these men, and the humble starting-point from which humanity has advanced to ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... 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 of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... though he be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 God. Stoic idea of God as Reason, and as pervading the universe; adjustment of this to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Lucan, Strabo, and Lucilius Junior. While the poets on the one hand had invested AEtna with various supernatural attributes, and had made it the prison of a chained giant, and the workshop of a god, Lucretius and others endeavored to show that the eruptions and other phenomena of the mountain could be explained by the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... philosophers. This logos returns to the bosom of God after the sacrifice. Greek philosophy combined with Hebraic moral principles! Ah! it is grand synthesis; Seneca with his conception of a perfected humanity, Lucretius, Manlius—who called, rightfully too, Epicurus a god—and Heraclitus with the first idea of a logos: all these ancient ideas I have worked into my romantic play, including the old cult of the Trinities; the Buddhistic: Buddha, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... precisely to the purpose 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 ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... personification depends wholly on the use of an initial capital, are examples of the other. Neither has the art of combining the vastness and vagueness of the abstract with the precise and definite conception of a person, as is done in the great figure of Religion drawn by Lucretius, as is done also in those other figures—the only creations of English poetry which approach the Latin in grandeur—the horrible phantoms of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... of these great problems are perceived here and there among the ancients as well as the moderns, from Lucretius and Plutarch down to Kepler, Bouillaud, and Borelli. It is to Newton, however, that we must award the merit of their solution. This great man, like several of his predecessors, conceived the celestial bodies to have a tendency to approach ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 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 ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... 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
... are transacted, 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 years. [Came to Charlottenburg, August, 1742 (old Polignac had died ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... accomplished by such means as those, in the way of mere chance or 'the fortuitous concourse of atoms.' We are led by the most fundamental dictates of our reason to conclude that there must be some cause for this co-operation of causes. I know that from Lucretius' time this has been denied; but it has been denied only on grounds of feeling. No possible reason can be given for the denial which does not run counter to the law of causation itself. I am therefore perfectly clear that the only question which, from a purely rational point of view, here ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... perpetual changes of arrangement, yet they 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
... wards are oiled, it is also that the key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And we could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... represents him as having derived the arts of weaving and sewing from the spider, and the art of building of tempered clay from the swallow; and we also read in Pliny's "Natural History," that the nest of the swallow suggested to Toxius, the son of Coelus, the invention of mortar. According to Lucretius, men learned music from the song of birds, and Pope describes them as learning from the mole to plough, from the nautilus to sail, and from bees and ants to form a political community. Perhaps we were behind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... fair Vassar-bred lass at 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 any fun Out ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... days will come when our posterity will marvel that we were ignorant of truths so obvious." [2] So, too, the Epicureans, like the Greek tragedians before them, believed that human knowledge and effort had lifted mankind out of primitive barbarism and Lucretius described how man by the development of agriculture and navigation, the building of cities and the establishment of laws, the manufacture of physical conveniences and the creation of artistic beauty, had risen, "gradually progressing," to his present height.[3] Such hopeful changes ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... 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
... us. Then, in the second century before our era, Ennius made a patriotic attempt to sing the origin of Rome in the Annales in eighteen books, of which only parts remain, while Hostius wrote an epic entitled Istria, which has also perished. Lucretius' epic "On the Nature of Things" is considered an example of the astronomical ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... For, on the one hand, science may express the individual; and, on the other hand, art may express the concept. The geographer, for example, describes and makes maps of particular regions of the earth's surface; the astronomer studies the individual sun and moon. Poets like Dante, Lucretius, Shakespeare, and Goethe express the most universal concepts of ethics or metaphysics. But what makes men poets rather than men of science is precisely that they never limit themselves to the mere clear statement of the concept, but always express its human significance as well. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... there are other places where its origin is traced with more precision. One of the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" says that he has read, but does not remember where, "that this line was immediately taken from one in the 'Anti-Lucretius' of Cardinal Polignac."[12] Another correspondent shows the intermediate authority.[13] My own notes were originally made without any knowledge of these studies, which, while fixing its literary origin, fail to exhibit the true character of the verse, both in its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... universal movement and the peace and quiet of infinity calm and restore the soul. Meditation comes with eventide as naturally as action with the morning; our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one. In the noblest passage in Latin poetry Lucretius invokes the universal spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the creative force which impels the stars and summons the flowers to strew themselves in the path of the sun. There is nothing so refreshing, so reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the fountain whence all visible life flows, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of Nature. The negation of miracle—the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... 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 maxims of the world, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... came a great exaltation. For this tiny creature could now seal the stars and bind the Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun. What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of soul was not his! To Copernicus belongs properly the praise lavished by Lucretius on Epicurus, of having burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having made man equal to heaven. The history of the past, the religion of the present, the science of the future—all ideas were transmuted, all values reversed by this ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and 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, 'peoples, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... doubt the most 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Paoli to repeat one of the introductory stanzas of the first book of Tasso's Jerusalem, which he did, and then Johnson found fault with the simile of sweetening the edges of a cup for a child, being transferred from Lucretius into an epick poem[981]. The General said he did not imagine Homer's poetry was so ancient as is supposed, because he ascribes to a Greek colony circumstances of refinement not found in Greece itself at a later period, when Thucydides wrote. JOHNSON. 'I recollect but one ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... midnight lamp." He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her, slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he came to be in his wife's bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he have said? But the point is Lucrese ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... significance of the details criticised. 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 ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... various ways, as progress and as deterioration, but in general they thought of it as a cycle. The first clear description of the history of mankind as a progression by various stages, from a condition of primitive savagery to civilization, is in Lucretius' great poem De Rerum Natura. But Lucretius does not conceive this progress will continue. On the contrary he recognizes that the world has grown old and already shows signs of decrepitude which foreshadow its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... ze:mia}), 'danista', 'harpagare', 'apolactizare', 'nauclerus', 'strategus', 'morologus', 'phylaca', 'malacus', 'sycophantia', 'euscheme' ({Greek: eusche:mo:s}), 'dulice' ({Greek: douliko:s}), [so 'scymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed except by him; 'mastigias' and 'techna' appear also in Terence. Yet only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus lived, it was well done ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... 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 rules of poetry ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Of Modern English Poetry Fielding Longfellow A Friend of Keats On Virgil Aucassin and Nicolette Plotinus (A.D. 200-262) Lucretius To a Young American Book-Hunter Rochefoucauld Of Vers de Societe On Vers de Societe Richardson Gerard de Nerval On Books About Red ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... flattening their ears, and otherwise resenting the incongruity. Meantime a fourth figure, a colossal young Kafir woman, looked on superior with folded arms, like a sable Juno looking down with that absolute composure upon the struggles of man and other animals, which Lucretius and his master Epicurus assigned to the Divine nature. Without jesting, the grandeur, majesty, and repose of this figure were unsurpassable in nature, and such as have vanished from sculpture two thousand years ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... partly in their 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 as Aristotle's Constitution ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... realized a complete vision of the universe, no one has brought before the world with more boldness the problem of the soul and that of humanity. Under the title of poet he belongs not only to our national literature, but occupies a distinctive place in the world of intellect, with Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, among those inspired beings who transmit throughout succeeding centuries the light of reason and the traditions of ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, 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, it has ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... time of Christ the Latin poet, Lucretius, wrote a poem on "The Nature of Things." Here he describes how in the early years the beginnings of things in small, disjointed fashion moved about among each other at first in utter confusion, each trying itself with the other. After many trials the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses, which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to cause stars ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Hortensius, to believe in Janus and the Penates. "All very well for the people," said they. "The people must be kept in order by these superstitions."[297] But the secret could not be kept. Sincere men, like Lucretius, who saw all the evil of these superstitions, and who had no strong religious sense, would speak out, and proclaim all religion to be priestcraft and an unmitigated evil. The poem of Lucretius, "De Rerum Natura," declares faith in the gods to have been the curse of the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... lamp to you I give. Allusion to the {Lampadephoria} which Plato (Legg. 776B) uses to illustrate the succession of generations. So Lucretius (ii. 77): Et quasi cursores vitai ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... some fragments of his work on Nature have been found at Herculaneum. The additional sources of our knowledge of Epicurus are the works of his opponents, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of his follower Lucretius. Our information from Epicurean writers respecting the doctrines of their sect is much less copious than what we possess from Stoic writers in regard to Stoic opinions. We have no Epicurean writer on Philosophy except Inicretius; whereas respecting the Stoical creed under the Roman ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him, "the father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic culture was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses from the AEneid break his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... 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, shall ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... 35 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 ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... possession of these original editions is of the first consequence to editors who are anxious to republish the legitimate text of an author. Wakefield, I believe always regretted that the first edition of Lucretius had not been earlier inspected by him. When he began his edition, the Editio Princeps was not (as I have understood) in the library of Earl Spencer—the storehouse of almost every thing that is exquisite and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it—developing itself in correspondence with their development....Milton was the third epic poet.' The poets whom Shelley admired most were probably Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespear, and Milton; he took high delight in the Book of Job, and presumably in some other poetical books of the Old Testament; Calderon also he prized greatly; and in his own time Goethe, Byron, and (on some ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... like many modern sciolists, repudiated design in nature. Voltaire, treating upon Spinosism, says: "I am aware that various philosophers, and especially Lucretius, have denied final causes. I am also aware that Lucretius, though not very chaste, is a very great poet in his descriptions and in his morals; but in philosophy I own he appears to me to be very far behind a college porter or a parish beadle. ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... principles as there are species of compound bodies, and that the peculiar form of the primary particles of which any body is composed is the same with the qualities of the compound body itself. This was the celebrated doctrine of Homoeomeria, of which Lucretius furnishes a luminous account in his philosophic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete Quintilian, that of St. Gallen, now at Zurich; in thirty-two days he is said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius, Lucretius, Valerius Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus, Columella, Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Leonardo Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Warm drops distil.—Ver. 500. He alludes to the manner in which frankincense is produced, it exuding from the bark of the tree in drops; this gum, Pliny the Elder and Lucretius call by the name of 'stacta,' or 'stacte.' The ancients flavoured ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... alone, A lamp to lead 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 ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... hospitality and friendship motives for embracing injured by faction helped by religion of country, defined Love, the last legacy of Christ of self, not a fault Loyalty, a means to obtaining good character Lucretius ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... of Lucretius is a good instance of this. In many ways his denials bear a strong resemblance to ours. But the resemblance ceases a little below the surface. He denied the theology of his time as strongly as our positive thinkers deny the theology of ours. But the theology he denied was incomplete ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... nowhere in the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. The poet's affection—it is scarcely passion—is there, but in transcendence: he meditates more than he feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in his grim Nequicquam! which one of Mr Arnold's own contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and more popularity, but still with music and truth in Strangers Yet—here receives almost its final poetical ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... evidently referring to Varro "le plus moderne de tous les anciens."[7] Virgil evidently regarded Varro's treatise as a solid foundation for his poem and he used it freely, just as he drew on Hesiod for literary inspiration, on Lucretius for imaginative philosophy, and on Mago and Cato and the two ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... 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 ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... 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 ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... is elastic, and readily recovers from undue depression. The skeptical Lucretius tells us that the divinities are the creatures of man's fears, and would make us believe that all religion has its ground in fright.[3] And do we not hear this theory repeated by the modern unbeliever? What means this appeal to a universal, and an unprincipled good-nature in the Supreme Being, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... (ut saevis projectus ab undis, Navita) nudus humi jacet infans indigus omni Vitali auxilio, - Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aequum est, Cui tantum in vita restat transire malorum. LUCRETIUS, De ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... levelled at your readers, not at you. it is my opinion, that whoever wishes to be read by many, if his subject is weighty and solid, must treat the majority with more than is to his purpose. Do not you believe that twenty name Lucretius because of the poetic commencement of his books, for five that wade ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... algebra, finding out the unknown quantity by 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 ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... rather a tissue of eloquence and philosophical declamation than of imagination. He deals rather in sheet lightning than in forked flashes. As a didactic poem it has a high, but not the highest place. It must not be named beside the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius, or the "Georgics" of Virgil, or the "Night Thoughts" of Young; and in poetry, yields even to the "Queen Mab" of Shelley. It ranks high, however, amongst that fine class of works which have called themselves, by no misnomer, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... is the system of Epicurus and Lucretius. Without going so far back, there are a thousand others quite as ridiculous, with which it is unnecessary to charge your ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... each from each As urged above, distracted by the bane; But when at length the morbid cause declines, And the fermenting humours from the heart Flow back—with staggering foot first treads Led gradual on to intellect and strength."—Lucretius. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than with Majestical Beauty. 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
... of the poem is unknown, the very date is uncertain. The conception of the work is Lucretian, but in point of style, while full of reminiscences of Lucretius, the poem owes most to Vergil, whose hexameter has undoubtedly been taken for a model, though it has lost all its music. Except in the avoidance of elision there is no trace of the influence of Ovid. The poem might easily have ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... extremely problematical. For my part, under no circumstances can I think bliss to consist in ignorance; nor have I felt any particular discomfort in having learned at a very early age to put under my feet, as Lucretius expresses it, the strepitum Acherontis avari. On the contrary, it has made me a perfect cosmopolitan, extinguished all absurd national and religious prejudices, and rendered me at home wherever I travel; and I meet the Catholic, the Lutheran, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... [60:1] If we except Lucretius and Statius, I know not of any Latin poet, ancient or modern, who has equalled Casimir in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification. The Odes of this illustrious Jesuit were translated into ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... doubt that he and some of his friends afterwards received lessons in philosophy from Gassendi, whose influence must have tended to loosen him from the traditional doctrines, and to encourage independence of thought. A translation by Moliere of the great poem of Lucretius has been lost, but a possible citation from it appears in the second act of the Misanthrope. Legal studies followed those of philosophy. But Moliere had other ends in view than either those of an advocate or of the hereditary office of upholsterer to the King. In 1643, at the age of twenty-one, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... liberty of choosing two young men as quaestors, or treasurers. The first were Publius Veturius and Marcus Minucius; and a large sum was collected, for they assessed one hundred and thirty thousand, excusing orphans and widows from the payment. After these dispositions, he admitted Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, as his colleague, and gave him the precedence in the government, by resigning the fasces to him, as due to his years, which privilege of seniority continued to our time. But within a few days Lucretius died, and in a new election ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the Ptolemaic system on Europe. The keen school-life of 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 ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe |
