“Death is nothing to us.” - Lucretius. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. To inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel

There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. Everything has evolved randomly, though in the case of living organism it involves a principle of natural selection. Nothing lasts forever

There is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms

What human beings should do is conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world

We are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else

Understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; question authorities and challenge received doctrines; legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; imagine that there are other worlds beside the one star in an infinite universe; live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; contemplate without trembling the death of the soul

Find the mortal world as enough

The path of virtue is very full of toil and peril

Read on the nature of things

Humans are social animals: to realize one’s nature as a human then was to participate in a group activity

Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, not do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists

The feverish attempt to satisfy certain appetites cannot lead to the peace of mind that is key to enduring pleasure

Men suffer the worst evils for the sake of the most alien desires. They neglect the most necessary appetites as if they were the most alien to nature

It is impossible to live prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic

Why should the humans think of themselves as so superior to bees, elephants, ants, or any of the available species, now or in eons to come, that god should take their form and not another?

Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, ‘For our sakes was the world created’

Suffering is always finite. If it is slight you may despise it, if it If great it will not be long

The highest good of the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain

Pleasure is a code name for vice

Pain is a stepping stone to salvation

“Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy” - Petrarch

Be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good

Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into the conscious state of misery and anxiety and for fear of becoming miserable you never cease to be so always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moments peace but those who are content with little live day by day and treat a new day like a feast day

By virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do

What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hoped and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear

The serious issue is that false beliefs and observances inevitably lead to human mischief

There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance

The universe was not created for or about humans

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance

Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess. Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams

There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes but terrified humans instinctively respond with religious fear and start praying

Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one's fellow creatures

Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more

As it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one's community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitivenness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engages in them at the risk of a shipwreck

The goal must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safety

Nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion

The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear

Though we are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suggering, humans imagine they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise

Humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness

Grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is the good news

All speculation must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else

It is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder

Human beings must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate annd return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic

There are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either

None live more enjoyably than those who live righteously

No kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it

There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists

The world is fine as is. We have the knowledge, not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are

The universe is not all about us, something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe

Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us

We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm: Do we not see all humans unaware of what they want, and always searching everywhere, and changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?

After you expire not one of all these things will fill you with desire

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden

That To philosophize is to learn to die

Go out of this world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world

Our lives we borrow from each other and men, like runners, pass along the torch of life

Live life with pleasure and meet death with dignity

Fear of death is the cause of all of our vices

The world is nature alone and nature consists only of matter

Ignorance and fear are not necessary components of human existence