Democritus

while certain others, exalting themselves, force themselves to find slanders against the words, devising contentious inquiries — hunters of little phrases, zealots of paltry arts, "wranglers and twisters of thongs," as that man of Abdera says:

To me indeed even Democritus, a man great above all others, from whose springs Epicurus watered his little gardens, seems to waver on the nature of the gods.

Accuse Nature, who, as Democritus says, has hidden the truth deep in the abyss.

For Democritus — a great man indeed, but one who makes the soul out of smooth and round little bodies by a kind of chance concourse — let us pass him over;

And among them is Democritus (3), the famous natural philosopher, whose doctrine is that the minute particles in matter are dispersed, simple, indivisible, eternal, exceeding all reckoning, and imperceptible because of their smallness;

that the senses were narrow, the minds weak, the courses of life short, and—as Democritus said—that truth was sunk in the deep, that all things were held by opinions and conventions, that nothing was left to truth;

Now Epicurus does not greatly err in the points where he follows Democritus.

Hence not unreasonably did Democritus say that "few of the men of reason, stretching out their hands to this place which we Greeks now call air, said that all this was Zeus;

Democritus has said, there would have been no occasion for laws to prevent every man from living according to his own humour, if one had not done injury to another.

But that I may not have learned today for myself alone, I will share with you three sayings that have come my way, finely uttered upon about the same theme;

It will profit us, that saving precept of Democritus, by which tranquillity is shown—if we undertake not many things, either privately or publicly, nor things greater than our strength.