Epicurus — "It is better to lie on a humble pallet and be free from care than to own a golde…"
It is better to lie on a humble pallet and be free from care than to own a golden bed and be full of trouble.
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More from Epicurus
"It is not possible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is not possible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living a pleasant life."
"Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When that point is attained, pleasure does not further increase, but only varies in kind."
"The just man is tranquil, the unjust man is full of the utmost turmoil."
"The greatest good is the knowledge of the nature of things."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.