Epicurus — "The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things."
The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things.
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More from Epicurus
"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensation, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us."
"The quantity of pleasure is to be judged by the quantity of pain it removes."
"The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."
"It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself."
"The one who least needs tomorrow will most gladly greet tomorrow."
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.