“For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.”

Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 18, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to…" by Lucretius?

Lucretius45

Roman poet and philosopher -94–-55 BC

Related quotes

“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Death
Essays (1625)

“"Is it not a strange drift this of men," said the curate, "to hide what is under the veil of what is not? to seek refuge in lies, as if that which is not, could be an armor of adamant? to run from the daylight for safety, deeper into the cave? In the cave house the creatures of the night, — the tigers and hyenas, the serpent and the old dragon of the dark; in the light are true men and women, and the clear-eyed angels. But the reason is only too plain; it is, alas! that they are themselves of the darkness and not of the light. They do not fear their own. They are more comfortable with the beasts of darkness than with the angels of light. They dread the peering of holy eyes into their hearts; they feel themselves naked and fear to be shamed, therefore cast the garment of hypocrisy about them. They have that in them so strange to the light that they feel it must be hidden from the eye of day, as a thing hideous, that is, a thing to be hidden. But the hypocrisy is worse than all it would hide. That they have to hide again, as a more hideous thing still.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Source: Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879), Ch. 31 : A Conscience

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“Harry Dresden: There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear. Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts. And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Turn Coat (2009), Chapter 40

“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

“Fear can only grow in darkness. Once you face fear with light, you win.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 90

“It's not that we fear the place of darkness, but that we don't think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.”

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Source: Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person

“Around us fear, descending
Darkness of fear above”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

On The Beach At Fontana, p. 14
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“Wake the sleeper must, and confront his fears, or risk being lost in the dark places of the mind forever.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

“Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupation,
That is known as the Children's Hour.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Children's Hour http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19249, St. 1 (1860).

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Lucretius45

Related quotes

Related topics