Epicurus — "The wise man is not afraid of death; indeed, he welcomes it as a release from th…"
The wise man is not afraid of death; indeed, he welcomes it as a release from the bondage of the body.
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More from Epicurus
"Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship."
"The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself."
"The study of nature is not a luxury, but a necessity for a happy life."
"The wise man is not concerned with the quantity of life, but with its quality."
"The man who says that all things are not possible to him is a fool."
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.