Lucretius

Love

Love is a wound and a fever; the wise see through its illusions and keep their peace.

Desire

Desires are endless and unsatisfiable; the wise person finds peace by recognizing nature's limits.

Pleasure and Pain

Nature demands only that pain be absent from the body; the wise seek unmixed pleasures of the mind over the torments of desire.

Being

Atoms alone truly are; everything else is their temporary arrangement.

Immortality

The soul is mortal atoms that scatter at death; the real terror is not dying but fearing an afterlife.

Chance

Atoms swerve by chance from their downward path, and from this tiny randomness all freedom and becoming arise.

Change

All change reduces to the local motion of eternal atoms through the void.

Matter

Nothing exists but atoms and the void, and all the variety of nature is the dance of indestructible material particles.

Necessity and Contingency

Atoms fall by necessity, but a slight swerve breaks the chains of fate and leaves room for freedom.

Space

The void is as fundamental as atoms; without empty space, no motion or division is possible.

World

The world is an accidental concurrence of atoms in the void, without design, without gods, without purpose.

Fate

The atomic swerve breaks fate's iron chain; nature alone rules, but chance and freedom have a home in it.

Infinity

The universe is boundless in every direction, filled with an infinite number of atoms falling through infinite void.

Sense

Sensation is the impact of atomic films on the sense organs; the senses never lie, only judgment errs.

Progress

Civilization arose by natural necessity, not divine gift; the progressive conquest of nature through art and reason is genuine, but the desires it stimulates grow faster than the satisfaction it provides.

Life and Death

Death is nothing to us; the soul is mortal, composed of atoms that scatter at death.

Animal

No species is eternal; all arose by natural processes, and those unfit for survival perished.

Element

The true elements are atoms: indivisible, eternal, and varying only in shape, size, and arrangement.

Astronomy

Astronomical knowledge liberates the mind from religious terror; the heavens are ruled by natural law, not divine caprice.

Physics

All things consist of indivisible atoms moving through the void; nothing comes from nothing, and natural phenomena require no divine explanation.