Epicurus — "The pleasure which is sought after by the many is not true pleasure, but only th…"
The pleasure which is sought after by the many is not true pleasure, but only the absence of pain.
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More from Epicurus
"The greatest disturbance of the soul is not pain, but the fear of pain."
"I was never anxious to please the mob, for I have not learned what pleases it."
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
"It is better to be unhappy in a rational way than happy in an irrational way."
"We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they harm themselves."
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.