Epicurus — "The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself."
The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself.
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More from Epicurus
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity. For he admits that the very statement he is making is made of necessity."
"Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life."
"The just man is tranquil, the unjust man is full of the utmost turmoil."
"The wise man is happy even in torture."
"It is better to be unfortunate in a reasonable manner than to be fortunate in an unreasonable one."
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.