Epicurus — "The just man is tranquil, the unjust man is full of the utmost turmoil."
The just man is tranquil, the unjust man is full of the utmost turmoil.
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More from Epicurus
"We must therefore pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it."
"The wise man will not be more grateful for good things when they are present than when they are not."
"It is better to be a victim of injustice than to be the perpetrator."
"The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this."
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity."
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.