Epicurus — "The greatest good is prudence."
The greatest good is prudence.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man is happy even on the rack."
"If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not give him more money; diminish his desires."
"It is not possible for one to rid himself of his fears about the most important matters if he does not understand the nature of the whole, but is still in doubt about some of the things that are said …"
"It is not possible to dispel the fear of the most important things unless one understands the whole nature of the universe."
"Empty is the argument of the philosopher by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is n…"
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.