Epicurus — "The greatest security of all is to be found in a quiet life withdrawn from the m…"
The greatest security of all is to be found in a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude.
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More from Epicurus
"The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself."
"The pleasure of the soul is superior to that of the body."
"The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool."
"The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever and whenever this is present, pleasure is no longer increased, but has reached its stationary maximum."
"Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering."
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.