"Lucretius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into human conception; others would have required the most labored elegance of composition to support them. It is certain that this author, when in a happy mood, and employed on a noble subject, is the most wonderfully sublime of any poet in any language, Homer, and Lucretius, and Tasso not excepted. More concise than Homer, more simple than Tasso, more nervous than Lucretius, had he lived in a later age, and learned to polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself; he had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... 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 greatest of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 Or known, till, looking inward, each alone ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... 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 the earth has gotten ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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. The long passage is worth quoting entire because his comparison ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
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