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Apuleius Quotes
124–170
Lucius Apuleius (c. 124–c. 170) was a Roman philosopher, orator and romance-writer, of Berber North African origin. Apuleius' best-known work is his Metamorphoses, usually known in English as The Golden Ass.
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It is with life just as with swimming; that man is the most expert who is the most disengaged from all encumbrances.
For when you have once begun to serve the Goddess, you will then in a still higher degree enjoy the fruit of your liberty.
But he who knows what insanity is, is sane; whereas insanity can no more be sensible of its own existence, than blindness can see itself.
Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven.
No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the Gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.
They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which He has built...
Parit enim conversatio contemptum; raritas conciliat admirationem.
The pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good.
He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; He will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence.
But when all this has befallen, Asclepius, then the Master and Father, God, the first before all, the maker of that God who first came into being, will look on that which has come to pass, and will stay the disorder by the counterworking of His will, which is the good.
And thus He will bring back His world to its former aspect, so that the Cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing.
And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it.
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